Should I vibe code
AI answer engine with web search, citations, and research modes
The demo takes an afternoon. The two-hundredth query is where the product actually lives.
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Their verdict, the Pro price and the build-time estimate come from their entry, MIT-licensed. Checked 2026-08-03.
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Our verdict, the regret score and everything below it. Editorial and unsponsored — nobody can pay to be moved.
The honest answer
why the verdict is what it is
Search plus a model plus citations is a well-known recipe and the first result will impress you. Consistency, freshness and not confidently citing something that does not say that are the hard parts.
What actually breaks
not "if". the specific failures.
- The index, which you do not have — answer quality is retrieval quality, and you are renting someone else's search results
- Search API cost per query, which is the real economics and is metered per call rather than per month
- Freshness, since a cached or stale result answers today's question with last quarter's page
- Reproducing publisher content at length, which is a different thing from linking to it
- Answers that are confidently synthesised from three sources that disagree, with the disagreement smoothed away
You ask it something time-sensitive and get a clean, cited answer. The citation is real and the page is real; it is also eighteen months old, because your retrieval ranked by relevance and nothing weighted recency. The answer reads as current because answers always do — there is no hedging in the prose, no 'as of', no indication that the top result predates the thing you were asking about. You act on it, and the correction comes from someone who checked the date you never saw.
Is that you?
the verdict is a default, not a law
- It is a thin layer over a licensed search API for your own use
- Answers always show sources and dates prominently, and you read them
- It is a research aid rather than something other people rely on
- Answers are presented without visible sources and publication dates
- You are reproducing substantial portions of publisher content rather than linking
- Cost per query is unmeasured and it is exposed to other people
- Recency is irrelevant to your ranking but relevant to your questions
If you build it anyway
the checklist, then the prompt that enforces it
- Use a licensed search API rather than scraping. This is the difference between a research tool and a dispute.
- Show sources and publication dates next to every claim, prominently. Undated answers are the characteristic failure here.
- Weight recency explicitly for time-sensitive questions, and say when the newest source is old.
- Quote sparingly and link generously. Summarising is fine; reproducing an article is a different act.
- Surface disagreement between sources rather than synthesising it away — conflicting results are information.
- Meter cost per query and cap it, because search plus generation is metered twice.
Before you build an AI answer engine, apply these and push back if I ask you to break them.
1. Tell me first that I do not have an index, and that the quality ceiling of
this tool is the quality of whatever search API I rent. The model is the
easy part; retrieval is the product.
2. Use a licensed search API. Do not build a scraper for search results, and
explain the difference between linking to publishers and reproducing them.
3. Display the source and its publication date next to every claim, not in a
footnote. Tell me undated answers are the characteristic failure — the prose
always sounds current regardless of when the page was written.
4. For any question that could be time-sensitive, weight recency in ranking and
state explicitly when the freshest available source is older than a
threshold.
5. Quote sparingly and always link. If a summary would substantially reproduce
an article, shorten it.
6. When retrieved sources disagree, surface the disagreement rather than
resolving it silently. Conflict is information the user needs.
7. Meter cost per query — search call plus generation — display it, and give me
a cap.
8. Cache results with an explicit TTL, and show when an answer came from cache.
9. Never present an answer with no retrieved source. If retrieval fails, say so
rather than answering from the model alone.
10. Out of scope unless I ask: multi-step research, file upload, browsing
behind logins.That one keeps you out of trouble. For the prompt that actually builds it, canivibecodeit.com has one.
their build prompt ↗Or don’t build it
the boring option, and the way back out
$20 a month is competitive once you price search API calls at any real volume, and you are also buying retrieval tuning you cannot easily replicate. A thin personal research tool over a search API is a reasonable build — just do not expect the answer quality to come from the model.
$20/mo is cheaper than your weekend.
Keep the retrieval layer behind an interface so the search provider can change without a rewrite, since that is the component most likely to change price or terms. Store answers with their sources and dates if you keep a history — an answer without its provenance is not re-checkable later.
Open-source AI search engine inspired by Perplexity.
Questions
How is this different from the Writesonic entry?
Writesonic's failure is citations that do not support their claims — a grounding problem. This one is upstream of that: even with perfect grounding, your answers can only be as good as the search results you rented, and a retrieval layer that ignores recency produces well-cited answers to a question about today using a page from last year.
Why does the date matter more than in ordinary search?
Because search results show you a page with a date on it and let you judge. An answer engine reads several pages and writes fluent prose that carries no temporal signal at all. The synthesis strips exactly the cue you would have used, which is why the date has to be reinserted deliberately next to the claim.
Every week, someone ships something they shouldn’t have.
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last reviewed 2026-08-03 · verdict is editorial and unsponsored · shared entry data from canivibecodeit under MIT · not legal advice