The vibe coding hangover
Vibe coding — describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI tool write the code — has produced a generation of applications that were never really engineered. Founders, product managers and junior developers ship working software out of Cursor, Replit and Lovable in an afternoon. In a demo the results are genuinely impressive. Then real users arrive.
What comes out of a vibe coding session is a prototype wearing a product's clothes. It works on the surface and is fragile everywhere underneath: no tests, no error handling beyond whatever the model happened to include, dependencies pulled in without version pinning, authentication that passes a glance but fails an audit, queries that are fine at 50 users and time out at 5,000.
None of that is an argument against AI-assisted development. It is what happens when speed is the only variable anyone measured. Whether vibe coding is good or bad is the wrong debate. The practical question is who cleans up after it.
Where vibe coded applications break
Technical debt is the compound interest on engineering shortcuts, and AI code generators take shortcuts constantly. The codebases that reach us differ in stack and size, but the same five problems turn up in almost all of them.
Security gaps that never show in a demo
LLMs generate code that works. They do not generate code that defends. The OWASP Top 10 has listed injection flaws and broken authentication among the most exploited web vulnerabilities for years, and both appear consistently in vibe coded output:
- API keys and secrets hardcoded in client-side code or committed to version control
- Authentication flows that skip token validation, session expiry or role-based access
- SQL injection and XSS holes in user-facing inputs — the model generated a form, not a security layer
- Missing rate limiting, misconfigured CORS, unvalidated redirects
A secure web application is an architecture decision. Generated boilerplate does not acquire it by accident.
No tests, no safety net
Vibe coded applications almost never include tests — the model was not prompted to write them, and the builder did not know to ask. Every change after that is a gamble: fix one feature, break two others, and find out from your users.
Architecture that cannot scale
Code generators aim to get something running, not to keep it running under load. The usual patterns: all logic in one file or one giant component tree, database calls inside rendering loops, third-party APIs called synchronously in the request path, and no caching or queueing anywhere. Each of these is invisible at prototype traffic and expensive at production traffic.
Dependency sprawl
LLMs pull in packages to solve the immediate problem, without weighing alternatives, licence compatibility or maintenance status. The result is a dependency tree full of abandoned libraries, duplicated functionality and known CVEs — exactly the things a human catches during code review and an AI session skips.
No observability
Logging, monitoring and alerting do not get vibe coded. When the application breaks in production — and it will — there is no structured way to find out what happened, where, or why. One outage without logs is enough to turn a promising MVP into a rescue job.
Why cleanup is a service, not a DIY fix
The standard advice is "learn to code properly," and it misses the point. People building with vibe coding tools are not trying to become software engineers. They are founders validating ideas, product managers prototyping features, small teams moving fast on limited budgets. Telling them to go learn test-driven development and SOLID principles is like telling someone who just built a house out of shipping containers to go get an architecture degree.
What they need is engineers who can take what exists and make it production-ready. That is a service, not a course.
What a cleanup engagement looks like
Vibe coding cleanup is a structured engineering engagement — custom software development applied to a codebase that already proved its idea. It is not a rewrite. The business logic and user experience that work stay; the foundations underneath get rebuilt. At Scrums.com a typical cleanup runs as a fixed-scope delivery engagement in five steps:
- Codebase audit — a prioritised risk assessment, ranked by business impact
- Security hardening — secrets, endpoints and authentication first
- Test scaffolding — cover the critical paths the AI skipped
- Architecture restructuring — make the codebase maintainable and extendable
- Observability and deployment — logging, monitoring, CI/CD
1. Codebase audit
A senior engineer reviews the full codebase: architecture, security posture, dependency health, test coverage, deployment configuration. The output is not a generic report — it is a ranked list of what will break first, what is a security liability, and what can wait.
2. Security hardening
Fix the exposures first: secrets in code, unprotected endpoints, missing input validation, broken authentication. Everything else is academic if the application leaks user data.
3. Test scaffolding
Write the critical-path tests the vibe coding session skipped. Not 100% coverage for the sake of a metric — focused tests on signup, payments, data mutations and API integrations, so every later change carries less risk.
4. Architecture restructuring
Refactor the monolith into something maintainable: separate concerns, extract shared logic, introduce real state management, restructure database access. The next engineer who joins should ship a feature in their first week, not spend a month decoding one file.
5. Observability and deployment
Structured logging, error tracking, health checks, and a CI/CD pipeline that makes deployments repeatable and reversible — so the team hears about breakage before their users do.
When to call for cleanup
Not every vibe coded project needs professional intervention. A landing page or an internal tool serving ten people can stay exactly as it is. These five signals mean cleanup is overdue:
- You are about to raise funding or onboard enterprise customers. Due diligence includes a technical review, and vibe coded architecture does not survive one.
- You have paying users and no test coverage. Every deployment is a coin flip with the trust you spent months building.
- Feature velocity has collapsed. Adding anything new breaks something old — the debt has compounded to where the codebase resists change.
- You have had a security incident or a near-miss. Exposed keys, leaked data, or a penetration test that came back red.
- You are hiring engineers into this codebase. Nobody experienced stays productive in unstructured, untested code. You will lose them, or pay them to rewrite it.
How Scrums.com runs cleanup
Scrums.com deploys senior engineers into cleanup and refactoring engagements — your timezone, your tools, your codebase. This is not an outsourced rewrite where the code comes back unrecognisable. Engineers are vetted through technical assessments, paired with your team, and managed through structured check-ins and delivery milestones. Engagements typically run 4 to 12 weeks depending on codebase size and severity.
Most cleanup clients are SaaS and technology companies that validated fast with AI tools and now need the engineering to match the ambition. The vibe coded version proved the idea. The cleanup makes it a product.
Start a conversation about what your codebase needs. No commitment, no pitch deck required.
FAQ
Is vibe coding bad for building software?
Vibe coding is effective for prototyping and validating ideas quickly. It becomes a problem when the prototype ships as the product without addressing security, scalability and maintainability. The code is not inherently bad — the risk is treating it as production-ready when it was never engineered to be.
What is vibe coding technical debt?
The accumulated engineering shortcuts in AI-generated code: missing tests, hardcoded values, monolithic architecture, unmanaged dependencies, absent error handling. The debt compounds as the application grows, slowing development and raising the risk of outages and security breaches.
Can you fix a vibe coded app without rewriting it?
Yes. A structured cleanup preserves the business logic and user experience while refactoring the engineering foundations. Full rewrites are rarely necessary — they throw away the validation work the prototype already delivered.
How long does a vibe coding cleanup engagement take?
Most run 4 to 12 weeks, depending on codebase size, severity and the target production requirements. A security-focused pass can be done in 2 to 4 weeks; full architectural restructuring takes longer.
What are the biggest vibe coding security risks?
Hardcoded API keys and secrets, missing authentication validation, unprotected API endpoints, SQL injection and cross-site scripting in user inputs. The gaps exist because LLMs generate functional code, not secure code.
