What vibe coding is actually good for
**Proving an idea exists.** A working thing beats a slide deck in every meeting ever held. If the question is whether anyone wants this, build it badly and quickly and find out this week.
**Internal tools.** The rota, the calculator, the dashboard that saves your ops person two hours a day. Nobody outside sees it, nothing breaks publicly, and the cost of being wrong is an afternoon. This is the single best use of the technique and it is genuinely transformative for small teams.
**Making a brief concrete.** It is far easier to react to a clickable thing than to a document. We often turn a brief into something clickable before anyone commits to a direction, and the conversation improves immediately.
Where the bill shows up
**Security, the moment money or data is involved.** Payment flows, logins, anything touching personal data. A model will produce code that works and will not tell you which of its choices is the one that leaks. Nobody reviewing that code means nobody catching it, and that is a category of mistake you cannot patch retroactively once it has happened.
**Performance, once real people arrive.** Generated code is generous with libraries. Three of them do the same thing, none are removed, and the page is four megabytes before anyone has written a headline. On a laptop it feels instant, which is exactly how speed problems hide.
**Editability.** The code has no CMS because nobody asked for one. Every copy change becomes a prompt, and if the person who wrote the original prompts has left, you own a site nobody can safely touch.
**Search.** Divs where headings should be, one page for eight services, copy that reads like the category. The structure search engines read is not visible in the browser, so nobody notices it is missing until the traffic does not arrive.
The rule we use
Vibe code anything where being wrong costs an afternoon. Do not vibe code anything where being wrong costs a customer.
That line is not about complexity. A one-page site that takes payments is on the serious side of it; a fairly elaborate internal dashboard is not. The question is exposure, not difficulty.
And when something crosses the line, it does not need to be thrown away. It needs somebody to read it, keep the good parts, and rebuild the three places where confidence was doing the work of knowledge.
Questions we get asked
Is vibe coding safe for a business website?
For a brochure site with no logins and no payments, the risk is mostly commercial rather than technical: it will probably be slow, hard to edit and weak in search. Once there are accounts, payments or personal data, an unreviewed build is a liability, not a saving.
How much does it cost to fix a vibe-coded site?
Usually less than a rebuild and more than people expect. A review and a fix list is a small fixed piece of work; the repairs are priced from what it finds. What decides the number is whether the structure is sound and only the surface is wrong, or the other way round.
Can I use vibe coding and still get a professional result?
Yes, and most good studios now do exactly that. The difference is that someone reads every line before it ships, deletes two thirds of the dependencies, and owns the outcome. The technique is fine. Skipping the review is what causes the damage.