Your MVP Isn't Minimum. I Timed Mine. Here's the Verdict.
On April 27th, a developer posted to Dev.to with a provocation buried in the title: they had actually timed the process of building their minimum viable product, and the verdict was that "minimum" is doing a lot of dishonest work in that acronym. The piece lands in the vibe coding space — that loose, feel-your-way-through-it approach to software development that has grown alongside AI-assisted tooling — and it strikes at something practitioners in that world quietly know but rarely quantify. Building fast doesn't mean building small. The MVP, as it is routinely practiced, has inflated into something closer to a medium viable product, with all the scope creep that implies, just wearing a leaner label. The author timed their own build to prove it. One developer, one stopwatch, one uncomfortable number.
If confirmed — meaning if this observation holds across a broader sample of vibe-coded projects — it means the productivity gains that AI-assisted development promises are being quietly consumed by expanding ambition rather than compressed timelines. Developers reach for AI tools expecting to ship faster, then unconsciously expand what "done" looks like because the tools make more feel achievable. The result is the same deadline pressure, the same half-finished features, the same technical debt, with a better origin story attached. For product teams and indie builders alike, this reframes the discipline question: the constraint was never the technology, it was always the definition. If vibe coding removes friction from building, it removes friction from scope creep too, and the latter is the one that quietly kills projects.
Watch for other developers posting timed builds or structured retrospectives on MVP scope — if this observation starts accumulating corroboration, it becomes a genuine critique of how the vibe coding movement handles product discipline rather than just one honest post-mortem.
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