AI is changing how we build software. With just a simple prompt, you can spin up a working app—no manual UI design, no hand-coded logic, no complex data setup. This new approach, known as vibe coding, makes it feel like anyone can be a builder.

But as magical as it feels in the beginning, prompting alone isn’t enough. If we want to go beyond demos and prototypes—if we want to build software that lasts—we need to solve one of the biggest problems in today’s AI tooling: context loss.

Vibe coding is powerful—until it isn’t

Vibe coding works best at the very beginning of a project. You describe what you want (“a dashboard for tracking team tasks”), and an AI app builder can generate something surprisingly usable. This is what makes it so exciting—speed, accessibility, and instant feedback.

But once you start iterating—adding new features, refining workflows, customizing access rules—the cracks begin to show. Every new prompt resets the context just a little. Eventually, the AI starts overwriting logic, introducing bugs, or forgetting earlier decisions altogether.

Why? Because prompting is a one-way interaction. There’s no memory of why things were built a certain way. There’s no persistent structure that ties the app back to the original requirements. Over time, you lose track of what the app is supposed to do—and more importantly, why it was supposed to do it.

That’s a problem no no-code platform ever solved either. But AI-first tools have a chance to get this right—if they rethink how intent is captured.

Structured requirements are the real foundation

To build real, production-ready software, we need to stop thinking in terms of outputs (screens, buttons, flows) and start thinking in terms of requirements.

When you capture the actual intent behind a feature—who it’s for, what it should do, how it should behave—you give the AI a much clearer foundation to build from. And more importantly, you create a structure that can evolve over time.

A strong AI app builder shouldn’t just generate apps. It should also:

• Store and track requirements as a source of truth

• Maintain context across prompts and iterations

• Help you see how each change affects your software’s behavior

• Prevent AI from rewriting things it shouldn’t

This is how we move beyond vibe coding. This is how we avoid the trap of starting over every time something breaks. And this is how we ensure that AI-powered development becomes a tool for real products—not just one-off experiments.

What’s next for AI app builders

Most no-code platforms focused on helping people build faster—but they didn’t solve the complexity that comes with growing a real product. AI gives us a new opportunity: not just to speed up the build process, but to rethink how building should work from the ground up.

At Sutro, we believe that it starts with structured requirements, not raw prompts. We’re building an AI app builder that keeps your intent intact—so you don’t lose context, even after 10 prompts or 10 iterations.

Because great software doesn’t just come from good ideas.

It comes from remembering why those ideas mattered in the first place.