Is Vibe Coding Bad? An Honest Answer

Ask a room of people whether vibe coding is bad and you will start an argument within a minute. One person says it is the future and everyone else is jealous. Another says it is a recipe for disaster. Both speak with great confidence, and both are talking about slightly different things.

I would like to answer the way a sensible friend would over lunch: what is good about it, what is genuinely risky, what it feels like week by week, what it really costs, and how to tell which situation you are in. By the end you should be able to decide for your own project, which is more useful than any general verdict.

First, agree on what we are judging

The phrase gets used in two ways, and half the arguments are people talking past each other. In the narrow sense, vibe coding means asking an AI to write software and accepting the result without really reading or understanding the code. You judge only by whether it seems to work. In the broad sense, people use it for any use of AI while building software, including careful work where a skilled person reviews every change.

Using AI carefully, and staying responsible for what it produces, is now an ordinary part of how many people work, and I see no serious objection to it. So when I ask whether vibe coding is bad, I mean the narrow sense: shipping things you do not understand.

What is genuinely good about it

• It lets ordinary people build things. A shop owner can make a tool that fits how she works. A teacher can build a quiz page. A community group can set up a sign-up form without paying for a developer it cannot afford.
• It makes prototypes cheap. You can put a working version in front of ten customers in a weekend, so bad ideas die cheaply and good ones start faster.
• It is a good way to learn. Seeing a working thing appear, then poking at how it works, teaches some people faster than a textbook.
• It removes drudgery. Even experienced developers use it to skip tedious parts and think about the harder ones.

The early minutes are genuinely thrilling. You go from an idea to something you can touch with no quote to wait for and no three-week back-and-forth. For someone who has carried an idea for years without being able to afford to build it, the first preview is emotional in a way that is hard to convey. And because changing things is cheap, you experiment: what if the homepage led with prices? What if there was a page for wholesale customers? Ideas that would have died in a meeting get tried and kept or dropped in minutes.

What the second week feels like

Somewhere between the first hour and the first week, the mood changes. This is the phase nobody puts in the highlight videos. Working with an AI is like managing an intern who is astonishingly fast, endlessly cheerful and incapable of saying "I'm not sure."

• The loop. You ask for a fix. It changes something. The problem persists or a new one appears. You ask again, and it changes something else, perhaps undoing its earlier change. Three rounds later you are further from what you wanted. This happens to nearly everyone and is not a sign you are doing it wrong.
• The drift. A project built through many small instructions gradually stops having a shape. Nobody decided the structure; it built up. After twenty changes, two pages look slightly different for no reason and something that worked yesterday has quietly stopped. The AI does not carry a clear memory of your project, so each instruction is partly a fresh guess.
• The confident mistake. It says it fixed something and it did not, or says it added a feature and the feature is a button that does nothing. The tone is equally sure either way, so you can miss it until a real person hits it.
• The vague result. "Make it look professional" gets you the visual equivalent of beige. These tools reward specific instructions.

The real risks

A vague sense of unease is less useful than a specific worry you can act on, so here they are one by one.

Security. This is the one I would take most seriously. When code is written by an AI and never inspected, nobody has checked that it protects people's information. A login screen is only the front door. What matters is who can reach what behind it. An app can look secure and still let one user view another's details because a hidden setting was wrong. For a private tool used by three colleagues, that is a small worry. For an app holding customers' personal information or taking payments, it is a big one, because the people harmed are not you. They are your customers, and they will remember who let them down.

Things that break and stay broken. Over weeks, a project built by many small instructions can become a tangle nobody fully understands. When something goes wrong, you are debugging a system you never really met.

Maintenance. Software is not finished when you publish it. Outside services change and features are requested. If nobody understands the code, every change is a gamble. That is manageable for something short-lived and a serious problem for something you hope to run for years.

Learning less than you think. If you never look at what the AI writes, you can build a lot without learning how any of it works. That is fine if your goal is a working tool. It is less fine if you want to become a developer, or may one day need to fix it yourself.

What it really costs

"Free to try" is not the same as "free to finish." Most builders charge in a way that grows with your use of the AI. Every request uses a slice of an allowance, called credits or messages or something similar. A good request costs little. A confusing one that sends the tool round in circles can eat a surprising amount, and the frustrating loop above is exactly what burns it fastest. The phase that makes you most unhappy is also the phase that costs the most.

• Hosting and data can be charged separately from the AI part.
• Your own time. Something cheap in money can be expensive in hours, especially when you are fighting a stubborn problem late at night.
• Exchange rates. Most of these services price in dollars. If you pay from Nigeria, the same plan can feel much heavier some months than others, and a card that fails at renewal can pause your work at a bad moment.
• Fixing it later. This is the biggest hidden bill. A project quick to make can be slow and expensive to repair once it grows, because nobody fully understands it. Paying someone to untangle a mess often costs more than building it properly would have.

Vibe coding often is cheaper, sometimes dramatically. But the sticker price is not the whole cost, and treating it as the whole cost is how people end up feeling cheated.

So which is it? A four-question test

Instead of a verdict, ask four questions about your specific project.

1. Who gets hurt if this fails? Only you, or other people?
2. What does it hold? Nothing sensitive, personal details, or money?
3. How long must it last? A few weeks or several years?
4. Can someone competent check it? You, a friend or a professional?

If the answers are "only me," "nothing sensitive," "a short time" and "it hardly matters," vibe coding is a perfectly good tool and I would encourage you to enjoy it. If they involve customers, personal data, money or a long life, it is not bad in itself, but it needs a human in the loop: someone who can read what was built and take responsibility for it.

Three imagined projects

Illustrative examples: the projects below are made up to show how the test works. They are not real clients or real results.

• A personal budget tracker for your own use. Fine. Go wild. If it breaks, you lose an afternoon.
• A booking page for a small clinic. More serious. It holds patients' names and phone numbers, possibly the reason for the visit. Use AI to help, but have someone who understands security check how the information is protected before it goes live.
• An app where people keep a balance and pay for services. Not a place for unchecked generated code. Money, accounts and other people's trust are involved. Use a proven platform, a developer who takes responsibility, or at least a thorough independent review.

A week in the life, imagined

Illustrative example: the person, salon and numbers are made up. This is not a real client or a real result.

Someone builds a small booking site for a hair salon. Monday evening is a delight: the site appears and looks good. Tuesday they add a booking form and it works. On Wednesday they want customers to pick a stylist, and the tool adds that, but the form no longer sends the email. Thursday is the loop: fix the email, break the stylist choice, fix that, break the layout on phones. By Friday they have used most of the month's allowance and are quietly annoyed.

On Saturday they change approach. They go back to the last version that worked, write exactly what they want in one precise paragraph, and add features one at a time, testing each on their own phone. By Sunday it works. It took most of a week, some money and one lost temper, and the result is genuinely good. A realistic story, not a horror story and not a fairytale.

Habits that make it work

• Match your level of care to the stakes.
• Write down what you want before you start, including what you do not want in the first version.
• Ask for one change at a time and look at the result before the next.
• Save every working version somewhere you can return to.
• If the tool fails to fix the same thing three times, stop repeating yourself. Go back, rephrase, or ask a human.
• Test with two accounts, so you know one person cannot see another's information.
• Keep the AI away from live data and real money while experimenting.
• Test on your own phone with mobile data, where many of your visitors will be.
• Own your domain and your code, so you can leave.
• Get an independent look before real customers depend on the thing.
• Set a budget of time and money before you begin, and stick to it.

The argument about skill

Some of the heat in this debate is really about pride. Professional developers spent years learning a craft, and it can sting to watch someone produce a similar-looking result in an afternoon. Newcomers feel talked down to when told they are not real builders. Both reactions are human, and neither helps you decide.

The useful way to see it is that generating code and being responsible for code are different skills. The first has become much easier. The second has not, and it is the one that matters when something goes wrong at midnight, or when a customer asks how their information is protected. You can hand the first to a machine. The second still needs a person, and it is worth being honest about who that person will be.

The honest answer

Is vibe coding bad? Not in itself. It is a powerful shortcut with one specific weakness: it lets you build faster than you can check. On small, forgiving things that weakness barely matters. On things people rely on, it is the whole story. Enjoy the fun part for what it is, expect the frustrating part and budget for the costly part, and you will be better off than most people who try it.

If you have already built something that matters and are not sure it is safe, our code audit and project rescue service exists for exactly that moment, and it is far cheaper to hear about a problem from us than from a customer. New to the subject? Start with what vibe coding is, then see how to vibe code a website and your first app, or how to choose a tool.