Why Vibe Coding Is a Terrible Idea

0
Nov 7, 2025 / by
Why Vibe Coding Is a Terrible Idea

You’ve probably seen the term “vibe coding” floating around in recent months. It sounds light, modern and subtly creative, right? But what’s the idea? In essence it’s a concept we’re all slowly becoming accustomed to, skipping the elbow-grease of traditional programming to “tell the machine what you want” and let the AI spin up code. 

Sounds pretty tempting. A tweak here and there, a few last-minute checks and ready to ship. Smooth sailing, right? Unfortunately, the reality is far murkier, especially if you’re building things that matter, or running a business that depends on reliability, maintainability and trust.

What is vibe coding? 

The term was popularised in early 2025 by Andrej Karpathy (former head of AI at Tesla, co-founder of OpenAI), who described it basically as: “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”. In short: you provide natural-language prompts to large language models (LLMs), they output code, you refine, test, perhaps deploy. “Coding by vibe,” as the social media quip goes.

And yes, there are real advantages: speed, accessibility, creativity. You can prototype fast, non-programmers can build tools, ideas can move from brain to screen quicker than ever. But (and here’s the rub) for many business contexts this approach carries serious risks.

1. The Illusion of Ease

When vibe coding glows in articles it tends to gloss over a key fact: behind every “it just worked” snippet there tends to be a lot of manual review, debugging, re-structuring. As several tech commentators point out, if you accept code that you don’t fully understand, you’re inviting hidden bugs, maintainability chaos and technical debt. Imagine building your site or product on something you only half-understand. The results will only ever be unstable and imperfect.

2. Security & Quality Compromises

Here’s where the narrative gets worrying, because when AI-generated code goes unchecked it can replicate known vulnerabilities, embed insecure patterns, and propagate risk at scale. For a digital marketing site, that might mean a plugin crashes, a form leak happens, or the “fun little app” you built becomes a liability. The fast prototype becomes the neglected graveyard of tech debt.

3. Maintenance Becomes a Minefield

You might ship fast, but for how long? Vibe coding often treats code as disposable. It might be good for weekend hacks or quick prototypes, but is far less suited for systems that need updates, are built on for months or years, or have interdependencies. Research shows that while vibe coding accelerates creation, “resulting code is fast but flawed,” and many skip proper testing or code review. On the web marketing side, that’s a red flag: a landing page, app or tool that can’t adapt kills optimisation potential, readability, performance gains.

4. Erosion of Expertise

If you lean too heavily on a “vibe first” approach, you risk losing underlying knowledge. What happens when the AI-generated code fails, or when you need to customise for edge cases, scalability or auditability? A developer without deeper understanding often won’t know how to fix or improve it. One blog sums it up: “handing over control to an AI tool to write all the code.” Why is that bad? Because when it breaks you’re stuck. 

5. Business Risk, Not Just Tech Risk

For a web-marketing agency (or any business) this is more than a tech caution. If a tool you built with vibe coding goes down, or behaves unpredictably, you impact brand trust, client relationships, and credibility. You may save on development cost and time, but risk the ripple effects of poor UX, broken functionality, or security failures. The “just vibes” mindset doesn’t align with the discipline needed for sustained digital marketing success.

So, what should you do instead?

Treat it as prototyping, not production: If you’re exploring ideas, building quick MVPs, vibe coding might make sense. But if you’re building something that must last, treat it like any other development effort.

Insist on oversight and review: If AI-generated code enters your system, make sure someone qualified checks it for performance, security, readability and integration with your existing stack.

Maintain human expertise: Don’t let AI replace foundational skill. Use AI tools to accelerate, but keep strong engineering habits and guardrails.

Apply to appropriate use-cases: Quick landing-page tweaks, prototype tools, internal utilities may suit vibe coding. Mission-critical systems or customer-facing functionality less so.

Build for the long-term: Code architecture, maintainability and update paths all matter. Vibe coding often shines short-term but flounders long-term.

Final Thoughts

Vibe coding sounds fun in principle. And for certain tasks it is. But it’s not serious business and in the context of marketing and digital assets you intend to build, scale and maintain, it’s a poor substitute for disciplined development practice.

So, if you’re tempted to skip the line and dive into vibe coding for your next app, campaign tool or web-project, pause and ask: Will this need to scale? Will others use it? Will it require updates, security? Will a quick hack become a burden?

If the answer is yes, then treat vibe coding as the gamble it is, not the silver-bullet it’s marketed as. Your brand, your users and your investment all deserve more than just a “vibe”.

Tags: /