Vibecoding: When It Works, When It Breaks, and How to Do It Right

The term "vibecoding" started as a joke. You describe what you want, the AI writes the code, you hit accept, and somehow it works. No architecture diagrams, no specs, no planning. Just vibes.

And honestly? For certain things, it's the fastest way to ship I've ever seen.

But I've also watched vibecoded projects collapse under their own weight within weeks. The difference between the two outcomes isn't luck. It's knowing when to vibe and when to stop.

What Vibecoding Actually Is

Vibecoding means using AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude, Copilot) as your primary driver. You describe intent in natural language, the AI generates code, and you iterate by describing what's wrong rather than fixing it yourself.

The workflow looks like this:

You write a prompt describing what you want
The AI generates a file or function
You run it, see what's wrong
You describe the problem back to the AI
Repeat until it works

No manual debugging. No reading documentation. No understanding the code at a deep level. Just conversation and iteration.

Where Vibecoding Excels

I've used vibecoding to build things in hours that would have taken days:

Landing pages and marketing sites. Describe the layout, the color scheme, the copy. The AI generates clean HTML/CSS. Perfect use case.
One-off scripts and data transformations. "Parse this CSV, extract these fields, write to this API." Done in minutes.
Prototypes and proof-of-concepts. When you need to show something working, not build something lasting.
Boilerplate and scaffolding. CRUD endpoints, form validation, database migrations. The tedious parts that follow predictable patterns.

The common thread: these are tasks where correctness is immediately visible and the cost of bugs is low.

Where Vibecoding Fails

Here's where I've seen it go wrong, repeatedly:

Security-Critical Code

The AI doesn't think about attack vectors. It generates code that works for the happy path but leaves doors wide open. CSRF protection, input sanitization, authentication flows: these require understanding why each line exists, not just what it does.

Complex State Management

When your application has state that spans multiple components, sessions, or services, vibecoding produces code that works in isolation but breaks in integration. The AI doesn't hold the full system model in its head the way you need to.

Performance-Sensitive Systems

AI-generated code tends to be correct but naive. It'll use O(n²) algorithms where O(n) exists. It'll make database queries inside loops. It'll load entire datasets into memory. These problems are invisible until production traffic hits.

Anything You Can't Verify by Looking at It

If you can't tell whether the code is correct by running it and checking the output, vibecoding is dangerous. Cryptographic operations, financial calculations, concurrent data access: these need someone who understands the domain.

How to Vibecode Without Dying

The developers who use vibecoding effectively treat it like a power tool, not autopilot. Here's the framework I use:

1. Vibecode the First Draft, Engineer the Second

Let the AI generate the initial structure. Then read every line. Understand what it did. Refactor what doesn't make sense. This is faster than writing from scratch but safer than blind acceptance.

2. Never Vibecode Security

Write authentication, authorization, and input validation by hand. Or at minimum, review every line the AI generates for these with the same rigor you'd apply to a code review from a junior developer.

3. Keep the Context Window Clean

The AI produces better code when it has clear context. A 200-line file gets better suggestions than a 2000-line file. Small files, clear interfaces, focused prompts.

4. Test What the AI Writes

If you don't have tests, you don't have confidence. Write tests for the AI-generated code. Or better: write the tests first, then let the AI generate the implementation.

5. Understand the Code You Ship

If you can't explain what the code does, you can't debug it when it breaks. And it will break. Vibecoding that produces code you don't understand is technical debt with a very short fuse.

The Real Value of Vibecoding

The best developers I know use AI constantly. They're not purists who refuse to touch it, and they're not cowboys who accept everything blindly. They use it to move faster on the boring parts so they can spend more time on the hard parts.

Vibecoding doesn't replace engineering judgment. It amplifies it. A developer with good instincts and an AI coding assistant ships 3x faster. A developer with bad instincts and an AI coding assistant ships 3x as many bugs.

The vibe matters. But so does the craft.