Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is a style of software development where you describe what you want in plain language and an AI tool (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Lovable, v0, Bolt) writes the code for you. The term was popularized by Andrej Karpathy in 2025 and captures the feeling of a developer who stops worrying about individual lines and just rides the vibe - accepting suggestions, testing the result, and describing the next step. For a prototype, it's astonishingly fast.

The catch is what happens next. Vibe coding is great for building a working demo over a weekend or validating an idea. It goes badly when you push that prototype straight to production and real customers and real data start depending on it. AI generates code that usually works, but it isn't always secure, testable, or maintainable. Input validation, error handling, permission checks, and a consistent architecture are often missing.

In audits of these applications we keep finding the same things: API keys hardcoded into the source, missing authorization on sensitive endpoints, SQL queries open to injection, and a database schema that can't grow without a rewrite. This doesn't make vibe coding bad - it means it has a clear boundary. Use it for quick validation and prototypes. Before you build a business on the product, have the code reviewed by someone who understands security and scaling. The line between a quick demo and a year of technical debt is thinner than it looks.