Some background:
I'm a software engineer with six years' experience, half of it in fintech, the other half in AI. Before this, I worked as the CMO of a bunch of startups. This gives a combined experience in tech of 11 years.

I've launched one startup in the past two years, but I didn't take it seriously despite its (at the time) unreasonable profitability. Inspired by that, I'm trying again—with my game face on.

Current status: Business name setup, co-founders in agreement, and I've started working on the backend service. I quite my job in July to clear my mind, went on vacation and started writing code purely for this about two weeks ago.

I won't give away what the service/product is, so unfortunately won't provide a sense of scope (ie a way to know if end of September is a reasonable deadline).

I am the sole engineer, yes, though I'm also interviewing a bunch of engineers.

Am I vibe-coding? Only in the sense that I sometimes assign tickets to GitHub Copilot, review its code, shake my head and extend the code with my fixes, then yes.

How this will resolve

In good faith. By October 1, I'll honestly announce if I shipped (with a link to the product) or not (with nothing to show for it).

Thanks, Manifolders.