Vibe Coded Apps : Be afraid, very afraid

Over the past couple of months I've been asked to work on three separate "Vibe Coded" apps. And the experience has been a huge education - and horrifying at the same time.

On each occasion the conversation has begun with something along the lines of "I have this amazing app, it just needs a couple of bits done to it to make it scalable...."

"Run! Run! Run for the hills!" the voice inside my head urges. But no... let's have a look at least.

And sure, on all three occasions - I saw what looked like a pretty decent app - Eyeball-pleasing, seemingly functional. Promising.

Then comes the "Well all it really needs is a couple of things added like user admin... and a bit of scalability... I mean... How hard can it be?"

The expression "How hard can it be?" represents the most dangerous combination of 5 words known to developers.

Now my inner monologue switches from "Run! Run! Run for the hills!" to "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY!", it's put on a life jacket, and is firing distress flares into the air.

"Aww, c'mon.... like they said... How hard can it be?"

I am not going to torture you with the gory details of the first two, but - let me take you through the experience with the third.

The front-end was a mass of code - While some things were relatively neat (nice use of components, clearly structured and commented) other elements were a vast mess of thousands of lines of code. The back-end appeared to meld at least three patterns - bits were very domain oriented, while other bits went to amazing lengths to add layers of abstraction.

On the front-end it took half a day just to sort out consistent styling (It had a theme context and used it sporadically throughout the app, but there were plenty of components that ignored it, and just as many that imported it then overrode the styles within the code.

That "silly little thing" about it not remembering the user's choice of lightmode/darkmode involved working on half a dozen components where again context was ignored and state was basically bungled.

Breaking some of the megaliths out into separate smaller (and reusable) components was relatively straightforward - with help from claude.

The back-end was such a hotchpotch that I just extracted the endpoints and re-implemented them with a template I regularly re-use (Yanno - rate limiting, authorisation, logging... the boring stuff).

In the end the "thing" that took 4 hours to vibe code, took 80 hours to turn into something usable at any scale.

What did I learn?

I will happily concede that this is a small sample - only 3 projects - and your mileage is bound to vary according to a host of factors. But here we go...

Lesson Number 1

Vibe coding is to software development what leaving a running chainsaw in a kindergarten playground is to health and safety

In the hands of someone who has little or no experience of software developent, vibe coding is absurdly dangerous.

In the hands of someone who knows a bit about software development it is even worse - because they know enough to ask it to do more complex things, but not quite enough to appreciate the mess they're making

In the hands of someone who has developed decent software, that original 4 hours becomes more like 10 hours - and yes - they can produce something that is pretty decent

Lesson Number 2

If you vibe code with the express intention of creating a POC rather than a "ready for prime time" app the downstream agony will be less

If when you're vibing away you keep propmpting it to create "mock" requests for things user lists and API calls you stand a good chance of leaving a clean work surface for an experienced developer to work with.

Lesson Number 3

Time spent initially with an experienced dev will make your future self very happy

In one of my three cases, I handed the app back to my viber buddy and spent some time with him talking through how to make modifications to it with claude. This has significantly improved the resulting output - In part because the very opinionated code - combined with a VERY VERY opinionated readme.md file provides claude with a good set of guidelines which really helps.

Lesson Number 4

Developers with a good understanding of design, architecture, security, and scalability are safe for a while yet

Whenever I read comments like "Vibe coding is great, it'll create loads of work for people to fix that rubbish" I do cringe a little - but it is kind of true. In order to fix these apps, though, I think you need a goodly amount of experience - and I genuinely fear for junior devs starting out in the busiess.

Lesson Number 5

Using GenAI for coding requires real skill if you want the output to be decent

I feel as if I am (maybe) 20% of the way there when it comes to being an adept user of GenAI coding tools - There definitely are techniques, approaches, styles, and prompts that make a world of difference - And getting into the core of whatever tool you're using to set up defaults / templates / rules is a must if you want your genAI buddy to write code that is consistent with the way you do things. A relevant analogy I'd put forward is the "Google Search" - I would say that 90% of people who use Google are barely white-belt googlers.... If you've used google intensively in research, it's likely that you're a black-belt googler - You'll know what terms to use, how to broaden or narrow searches, how to find arguments against your thesis as well ad for it etc - Working with GenAI tools requires the same kind of "FU" - We all have a bit of GenAI-Fu, but some of us are white belts and some are black belts.

Parting thoughts

I cannot deny that vibe coding produces stuff that is remarkable, I am also obliged to say that it will play an increasingly significant role at the inception phase of software projects. But right now - my personal lived experience is that it produces an awful lot of garbage.

I do expect it to improve at a very fast pace - Folk like the gang at Anthropic will do more to provide templated best practice that can be used to eliminate a good percentage of the horrors I've encountered. As it happens I'm working on something in this domain myself.

In the meantime there are plenty of opportunities for Vibe Coding Remediators to offer a service - And there is a TON of opportuity for people to teach practical courses on vibe coding that will reduce a fair but of the garbage too.