By 2026, I don’t need to tell you vibe coding is useful, you’ve probably already tried it. Still, thinking about it as a way of thinking that will solve all of your problems is probably a bit too optimistic.

It’s easy to get carried away while you’re typing prompts, but there are several real challenges with vibe coding that you need to think about. It almost always works until it doesn’t work anymore.

Where vibes are immaculate

From a personal (and business) standpoint, vibe coding at the start of a project is probably its best use. Since I feel a personal example is better than three abstract claims, I’ll share my own.

Throughout my career, I often got overwhelmed by tasks and had troubles organizing them in a way that my brain likes. Projects, writing, editing, sending interview questions and getting them back, for example. None of these are big tasks on their own but they’re very different in nature.

Finding a good task manager app was next to impossible, but I have managed to create a simple dashboard web app that has all the things I need and nothing more.

For many, my AI tool might be useless, but for me it’s the only one that works precisely the way my brain does.

The appeal is real, and undeniable. Because you know best what you want, getting AI to do it is just a matter of sending messages and tailoring the “thing” into whatever you’d like. For me it was a real solution for a problem I face every day, but for someone else it might be a prototype of a new app or service that went from brain to screen in three hours.

Where the vibes get bad

The problems start when vibe coding moves into production, and I’ve seen that with my eyes as well. While we all know what things should look like for the end user, most of us from non-technical fields do not have any idea what’s happening under the hood. That’s why you need to think about more than just vibes.

Code you don’t understand is code you can’t maintain. Easy enough; if you create a beast of a tool, app, or an entire service you intend to share with others, it’s very tricky to maintain it if you know nothing about it.

For example, it’s fine to create a massive SaaS solution you would use since you can troubleshoot issues with AI in your own time; there’s no real risk. But if you’re shipping the service to others, what happens if something breaks at 3 am for someone who paid for that service?

Security gaps stack up. Every security expert will tell you that nobody cares about security until something goes wrong. With vibe coding and AI, the “wrong” part can be built-in during the creation of the tools. AI sometimes just embeds API keys or other secret info in the code, doesn’t sanitize the code properly, and leaves a lot of open doors in general. If you’re not savvy and don’t think about this, you’re going to have a bad time. Also, remember that hackers also use AI to find weaknesses.

The DORA AI report shows what we’re all thinking. The 2024 DORA report found that AI adoption actually correlated with a 7.2% reduction in delivery stability. More telling: 39% of respondents said they had little to no trust in AI-generated code, yet nearly everyone was using it anyway.

The risk here is over-reliance on AI tools that leave you, their creator, sitting on the sidelines wondering what’s even going on.

Keep an eye out for over-vibing

In my experience, there are a few signals that you are perhaps in too deep into vibe coding, and it’s starting to become a liability. I’m not saying you should go and seek professional help, but for some of these help is really the only solution.

• You can’t explain what the code does, only what you asked the tool to make. If you try to explain it to a real engineer, the conversation is short and unpleasant for both sides.
• You’re using AI to explain code that AI wrote, which makes the explanation wrong as well.
• You’ve stopped writing tests because “AI will catch it”. And AI is, of course, not catching it for some reason.
• You’re patching AI patches. The original AI solution had a bug, you asked AI to fix it, that fix introduced another issue, and now you’re three layers deep.

I know that asking a senior engineer to help you fix your vibe coded app might be one of the more stressful experiences in your life, but if you’re set to be a vibe coder, that’s a chance you’ve got to take.

I’m not trying to ruin your vibe, but…

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that you should lose Claude Code and start typing everything manually (or by pasting from StackOverflow).

What I’m saying is that the ones who make the most out of vibe coding apps are the ones who could, theoretically, make the same apps themselves.

What I’ve found in the last month is that AI adoption and tendency to vibe code things is a pendulum: you either think it’s bad, complex and don’t want to touch it, and once you do start you can’t get enough of it. I’ve heard comparisons with “prime Call of Duty”, which is a reference only gamers would understand, but paints the picture.

A good vibe coding experience is like driving a convertible on a coastal road at sunset.

In 2026, people are exceptionally interested in making anything with Claude Code and other tools and the truth is that we don’t really need 90% of those.

So when vibing, I’d advise you to think small, and think about problems that you have. It’s ok to create a task management tool for you, and not to make money on, and it’s okay to vibe code a prototype of a new idea before presenting it.

I’d just like you to make sure to understand that using a tool mainly used by software engineers does NOT make you one, and you need to spend a lot of time understanding what the tool built in order to get close to the “real world.”

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