[jstummbillig]

That is probably not going to be the important difference.

You can't use it for theoretical physics because you have no meaningful question and there is no result that you can do anything with.

In contrast you don't need to be a coder to understand if your to-do list for cats works: You have an idea of what you want. You know the rough shape of what an app is and what it can do. You can put it in front of your can and look at it go. Or not.

[tdeck]

There are still some interesting pitfalls though. A friend of mine vibe coded a small browser based app to track something personal over a long time period. Eventually he plans to share the app with others. It worked, but I was curious where it stored the data and he didn't know.

It turned out it was using LocalStorage, which is not entirely unreasonable, but there are obvious drawbacks (e.g if you move the file it might become inaccessible, if you switch machines there's no convenient way to transfer the data, there are all kinds of ways to lose it, etc..).

In this case "how is this storing my data" is a fundamental question with plenty of implications for your app over its lifetime, but most non-computer people don't think to ask it at all. These days many users enter CS programs without knowing how to manage files and folders on their computer, because even that is often abstracted away.

[victorbjorklund]

Depends on what you are building. Yes, a todo app is easy. What would the physics version be? Probably ask ”what are the acceleration of a failing object?”

But if you are building some complex data science statistical model and you don’t have any domain knowledge you won’t even know what to ask for.