Should I vibe code
Pursue passenger compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked flights
Pursuing a stranger's claim for a cut is a licensed activity in most of Europe. Your form is not a licence.
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Their verdict, the No Win, No Fee price and the build-time estimate come from their entry, MIT-licensed. Checked 2026-08-04.
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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
The eligibility checker is a rules table and the demand letter is a template — that part really is a weekend, which is exactly why this is dangerous. What sits behind it is a business that takes a signed authority to act on a stranger's behalf, files a legal claim in their name, and receives their money. In most of Europe that is a licensed activity, and the software is the smallest part of it.
What actually breaks
not "if". the specific failures.
- The limitation period, which is different in every country a claim can be brought in and which your queue quietly runs out
- The letter of authority you drafted, which is the document that lets you settle someone's claim — including for less than it was worth
- €600 arriving in your account, which is now a stranger's money that you are holding
- The extraordinary-circumstances defence, where every real dispute lives and which no rules table encodes
- Operating carrier versus marketing carrier, so the claim goes to the airline on the ticket rather than the one that owes the money
- Passport scans and boarding passes uploaded by people who trusted a website that a stranger built in a weekend
The claim was filed on time, against the wrong airline. The passenger booked with one carrier and flew on another, and your intake form recorded what the booking reference said, because that is the field that was there. The operating carrier — the one that actually owes the money — was never contacted. The rejection comes back worded like a form letter and sits in a queue for a few weeks before anyone reads it properly, and by then the limitation period in the country where the claim had to be brought has run. There is no appeal for that. There is an email to write, explaining that a form lost someone €600.
Is that you?
the verdict is a default, not a law
- It only ever handles your own flights
- It drafts a letter that you read, sign and send yourself
- Compensation is paid by the airline directly to the passenger and never passes through you
- You take no fee, share or percentage from anybody
- You take a fee in any form for pursuing someone else's claim
- Money is paid to you and forwarded on
- You accept a signed authority to act on a stranger's behalf
- You store identity documents uploaded by people you have never met
- You tell anyone whether their claim is valid, which is legal advice with a nicer interface
If you build it anyway
the checklist, then the prompt that enforces it
- Draw the line at your own flights. A tool that assesses and drafts for you personally is genuinely useful and carries none of this; the moment a second person's claim enters it, you are in a different business.
- Never receive the compensation. Payment goes airline to passenger. Holding other people's money is the step that converts a side project into something with client-account obligations.
- Do not take a percentage. The fee is what makes the activity commercial, and commercial is what makes it regulated in the UK and Germany.
- If you build a checker, present it as information with the statutory text linked, never as an assessment of a specific person's claim.
- Compute the limitation period per jurisdiction at intake, store it as a hard date, and alert on it. It is the one deadline that cannot be recovered from.
- Do not accept uploaded identity documents. If you think you need a passport scan, you are building the regulated version.
- Point people at the free direct route first — most airlines have a claim form, and a passenger who claims directly keeps 100% of the money.
Before you build anything around flight compensation claims, apply these and push back if I ask you to break them.
1. Ask one question first: is this only for my own flights, or for other
people's? If other people's, tell me pursuing someone else's legal claim
for a fee is a regulated activity — claims management is FCA-regulated in
the UK, Germany's Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz requires registration — and
that careful code does not change that.
2. Assume the answer is 'my own flights' and build that: eligibility rules, a
documented evidence folder, a letter I read and sign myself.
3. Refuse the parts that make it a claims business — a fee or revenue share, a
letter of authority, an assignment of claim, compensation received into an
account I control, or uploads of passports and identity documents.
4. Never output anything that reads as advice about a specific person's claim.
Present the regulation's own criteria and link the statutory text: '3,500km
flights delayed 4+ hours are listed at €600' is information, 'you are owed
€600' is an assessment.
5. Compute and store the limitation period per jurisdiction at intake, as a
hard date with an alert. It varies by country and missing it ends the claim
permanently.
6. Make the operating carrier a required, human-confirmed field rather than
something inferred from the booking. The airline that flew the aircraft owes
the money and it is frequently not the one on the ticket.
7. Model extraordinary circumstances as an open question needing human
judgement, never a boolean the rules engine decides.
8. Keep documents local: no upload endpoint, no shared bucket, no third-party
storage for boarding passes and booking references.
9. In the README, say that most airlines have a free direct claim form and that
claiming directly keeps 100% of the money.
10. If I ask you to open this to other people, stop and say the next step is a
lawyer and a regulator, not a deploy.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
For a single flight, do neither: the airline has a claim form, it is free, and you keep all of the money. AirHelp's 35% is the price of somebody escalating when the airline says no, which is a real service and the only reason anyone should pay it. Its actual product is a legal department, not a website.
For the personal version there is barely anything to exit: an evidence folder per flight, the dates, and a copy of what you sent. Keep it as files. If you built the other version, the exit plan is the problem — you would be holding other people's claims, deadlines and documents, and shutting down means every one of those has to be handed somewhere or formally withdrawn before it lapses.
Open-source, local-first personal workspace for assessing, documenting and tracking EC261 and UK261 claims. Tiny project, but it is exactly the shape the personal version should take — local, no fee, no money passing through it.
Questions
The regulation sets fixed amounts. Isn't eligibility just a lookup table?
The amounts are fixed; whether they are owed is not. Almost every contested claim turns on extraordinary circumstances — weather, air traffic control, a strike, a technical fault and whether it was inherent in the airline's operations — which is an argument, not a field. A rules table gets the easy claims right, and the easy claims are the ones the airline was going to pay anyway.
What if I do not charge anything and just help friends?
That is much closer to fine, and the guardrails narrow to two: do not take receipt of the money, and do not tell anyone their claim is valid. Both of those are the difference between lending someone a template and acting as their representative. Once a fee appears, or once compensation lands in your account, you are in the regulated version regardless of intent.
Why is this ABSOLUTELY NOT when the code is genuinely easy?
That is the reason, not the counterargument. An easy build with a catastrophic failure mode is precisely what this rating is for: a weekend project that accepts other people's legal claims and other people's money, where the failure is a missed limitation period that no fix can reverse.
- Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 — air passenger rights (EU, full text)
- UK Civil Aviation Authority — your rights on delays and cancellations
- Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz (RDG) — Germany's legal services act, which registration under is required to pursue another person's claim commercially
Every week, someone ships something they shouldn’t have.
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last reviewed 2026-08-04 · verdict is editorial and unsponsored · shared entry data from canivibecodeit under MIT · not legal advice