Should I vibe code
Manage contacts and deals through a visual pipeline with activities and reminders
The pipeline view is a kanban board. The rest is data you are now responsible for.
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Their verdict, the Essential 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
Deals, stages and activities are straightforward. The obligation is that a CRM accumulates personal data faster than any other tool you run.
What actually breaks
not "if". the specific failures.
- Forecasting, which needs stage history rather than current stage — and the naive schema stores only where a deal is now
- Stage changes overwriting each other, so you can never answer how long deals sit in negotiation
- Activity reminders, which are the mechanism that makes anyone open the tool on a Tuesday
- Deal value across currencies and over time, where the rate at close differs from the rate at creation
- Reporting, which is the reason a manager buys this and is a query layer over data you have to have kept
Six months in, someone asks the obvious question: how long does a deal take to close, and where do they stall? You open the database and find a deals table with a stage column. It holds today's answer and nothing else. Every transition — the two weeks in proposal, the month in negotiation, the ones that went backwards — was an UPDATE that overwrote its predecessor. The pipeline works perfectly and cannot answer a single question about itself, and the fix requires history you never wrote down.
Is that you?
the verdict is a default, not a law
- It is a visual board for one person to see their own deals
- Nobody will ask for a conversion or velocity report
- Deals are few enough that you remember the history yourself
- Anyone will want conversion rates, velocity or forecasting
- Stage changes are stored as an update rather than an event
- Deals span currencies
- A manager is meant to make decisions from it
If you build it anyway
the checklist, then the prompt that enforces it
- Record every stage change as an event with a timestamp. The current stage is a projection. Without this, no report about time or conversion is possible, ever.
- Snapshot deal value and currency at each stage change, so historical reporting does not silently use today's numbers.
- Store amounts as integer minor units with an explicit currency, plus the rate used if you convert.
- Build activity reminders early. They are what pull people back into the tool, and a pipeline nobody updates forecasts nothing.
- Add a reason field on lost deals from the start — it is the single most useful reporting dimension and cannot be backfilled.
- Keep a deleted-deal tombstone rather than hard deletes, so conversion rates are not quietly improved by removals.
Before you build a sales pipeline tool, apply these and push back if I ask you to break them. 1. Store every stage transition as an immutable event with a timestamp, and derive the current stage from the latest event. Tell me plainly that a deals table with a mutable stage column can never answer how long deals take or where they stall, and that this history cannot be reconstructed later. 2. Snapshot the deal value and currency on every stage change. Historical reports must use the value as it was, not as it is now. 3. Represent money as integers in minor units with an explicit currency code. If deals span currencies, store the conversion rate and its date on the record. 4. Add a structured lost-reason field before launch. It is the most valuable reporting dimension and it is impossible to backfill once deals are closed. 5. Never hard delete a deal. Tombstone it, so removing records cannot silently improve conversion rates. 6. Build activity reminders — next action, due date, overdue view — in the first version. Tell me this is what makes people open the tool, and that an un-updated pipeline is worse than no pipeline because it looks authoritative. 7. Provide conversion rate, stage duration and win rate as queries over the event log, and show me those queries before building charts. 8. Ask me who will read the reports and what decision they will make from them. 9. Out of scope unless I ask: email sync, sequences, quotas, team permissions, forecasting models.
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
As soon as someone wants to know how the pipeline is performing rather than what is in it. $24 a month per seat buys stage history, reporting and reminders — the board itself is a weekend, and the board alone is the part that answers no questions.
$24/mo is cheaper than your weekend.
Export deals with their full stage-change history rather than current state, because the history is the asset and no other system can rebuild it from a snapshot. Keep contacts and deals linked by stable ids so a migration preserves which conversation belonged to which sale.
Active open-source modern CRM with extensible data models.
Questions
Why can't stage history be reconstructed later?
Because an UPDATE leaves no trace of what it replaced. Once a deal moves from proposal to negotiation, the fact that it spent nineteen days in proposal exists nowhere — not in a log, not in a backup taken afterwards. Every velocity, conversion and forecasting question depends on data you either recorded at the time or did not.
Is an event log overkill for a small pipeline?
It is about three extra lines at write time and it is the difference between a board and a tool that answers questions. Given that the questions arrive predictably — usually from whoever is paying — recording transitions from the start is one of the cheapest decisions available here.
Every week, someone ships something they shouldn’t have.
New verdicts, the worst thing that landed in the trap, and the occasional incident report. No other email, ever.
last reviewed 2026-08-03 · verdict is editorial and unsponsored · shared entry data from canivibecodeit under MIT · not legal advice