Guide
Vibe coding: what it is, and what breaks when real users arrive
You described an app, a model wrote it, and the thing works. Congratulations, that is genuinely impressive and it used to take a team. Now comes the part the demo videos skip.
What vibe coding actually is
Andrej Karpathy named it in February 2025: you talk to a model, it writes the code, and you stop looking at the code. You judge the result the way a user would, by clicking around. If something is wrong you describe the wrongness and ask again.
That is the whole thing. No secret method, no prompt library worth paying for. The tools people use for it are Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, Replit, Claude Code, and whatever coding mode their favourite chatbot shipped last month. The people doing it are mostly founders, designers, operators, and developers who are tired of writing the same setup for the fifth time.
Why it works so well for version one
Because version one has exactly one user, and that user is you. You know which button to press. You never type an apostrophe into a field that cannot handle it. You do not try to pay twice.
Under those conditions AI-written code is fantastic. An idea you would have argued about for a month becomes something you can click on Tuesday afternoon. Killing bad ideas fast is worth more than most people admit.
Then the second person shows up
The failures are not random. After enough of these codebases you start seeing the same six, in roughly the same order. We call them walls because that is what they feel like: everything is going fine, at speed, and then it is not.
The Second User Wall
Worked perfectly until someone else logged in at the same time.
The Auth Wall
Login works. You have no idea whether it is safe.
The Deploy Wall
It runs on your machine. It will not run anywhere else.
The Prompt Wall
You have stopped knowing what to ask for next.
The Payment Wall
You are ready to charge and afraid to touch money code.
The Handoff Wall
A real developer looked at your code and went quiet.
A checklist you can run this week
None of this requires a rewrite. It requires an afternoon of trying to break your own product on purpose, which nobody enjoys and everybody should do before strangers do it for free.
| What you notice | What is actually wrong | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| It only runs when you press play in the editor | No real environment. Secrets, domain, and database live nowhere. | Deploy exactly what you have to a live URL and write down everything that stops you. |
| A friend logs in and sees your data | Queries with no owner filter, and rules enforced in the interface instead of the database. | Open two accounts in two browsers at the same time and try to make them collide. |
| You have never signed out and pasted a private URL | Login that hides pages rather than protecting them. | Sign out. Paste the URL. If real data loads, your auth is a curtain. |
| Every new feature breaks an old one | The codebase outgrew the context window. The model is guessing at the parts it cannot see. | Write down, in sentences, what should change and what must not. If you cannot, that is the blocker. |
| Checkout worked once, on the test card | Declines, refunds, and renewals were never exercised. | Run a real charge, then a declined card, then a refund, and watch what your app does at each step. |
| A developer looked at the repo and went quiet | Nothing explains how to run it, and the structure only made sense during the chat that produced it. | Ask someone technical to get it running from scratch. Time them. That is your onboarding cost. |
So is vibe coding bad?
No, and the people saying it is are usually protecting something. Writing every line by hand did not stop anyone from shipping insecure software. It just made it slower and more expensive to be wrong.
The honest criticism is narrower. AI writes for the case it was shown, and it was only ever shown you. Nothing in the conversation forces anyone to think about the second account, the declined card, or the person who bookmarks a private URL. That gap is not a flaw in the technique, it is a step nobody scheduled.
How to get good at it
Ship one small thing all the way, including a real deployment, a real login, and a second account that is not yours. Those three take you past the point where most prototypes stop.
Then read the code for exactly those parts. Not all of it, that way lies a weekend you will not get back. Just enough that you can tell the difference between a model that knows and a model that is being confidently agreeable, which it does often and does well.
Keep a habit of asking for the failure case. "What happens if this request fails halfway" is the single most useful sentence you can add to a prompt.
Questions people actually ask
- What does vibe coding mean?
- Describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI model write the code, then judging the result by whether the app behaves, not by reading every line. Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in February 2025 for the habit of fully giving in to the vibes and forgetting the code even exists.
- Is vibe coding bad?
- No. It is a legitimate way to find out whether an idea is worth building, and it beats spending three months on a product nobody wants. It becomes a problem only when the prototype quietly turns into the production app and nobody stops to check the parts users can break.
- Is vibe coding the future?
- Some of it is. Generating a first version from a description is not going away. The interesting question is not whether AI writes the code, it is who understands the code once money, accounts, and other people's data are attached to it.
- What is the best vibe coding tool?
- Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, Replit, Claude Code, and the coding modes in ChatGPT and Gemini all get you a working first version. They differ mostly in how much of the surrounding infrastructure they hand you. Pick the one you enjoy arguing with, because you will be doing a lot of that.
- How do I learn vibe coding properly?
- Ship something small end to end, including deployment, login, and a second user account. Then read the code the model wrote for those three things specifically. You do not need to become a compiler engineer, you need to be able to tell when the answer you got is confident and wrong.
Want to know which wall you are standing at?
VibeWall is a six week program that takes AI-built products to production, with senior devs reviewing your actual code instead of a course you sit through. The founding cohort opens September 1.