A Business Owner's Guide to Vibe Coding

If you have been anywhere near the tech world in the past year, you have heard the term “vibe coding.” Maybe someone on your team used it to build an internal tool. Maybe a freelancer pitched it as a way to build your app faster and cheaper. Maybe you tried it yourself — typed a description of what you wanted into an AI tool and got working software back in an afternoon.

This article is for business owners who want to understand what vibe coding actually is, what it is genuinely good at, where it falls short, and how to make smart decisions about whether your business should rely on it.

No jargon. No hype. Just practical information.

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is the practice of using AI tools — like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Bolt, Lovable, or Replit Agent — to generate software by describing what you want in plain English. Instead of writing code line by line, you tell the AI “build me a customer dashboard with a login page and a table of recent orders,” and it produces a working application.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a former Tesla AI director, in early 2025. He described it as “fully giving in to the vibes” — letting the AI write the code, accepting the results without fully understanding the internals, and iterating by describing changes in natural language.

It is real. It works. And for certain use cases, it is genuinely revolutionary.

What Vibe Coding Is Genuinely Good For

Proving an Idea Quickly

Before vibe coding, validating a software idea meant either learning to code yourself (months of investment) or hiring a developer (thousands of dollars and weeks of waiting). Now you can have a working prototype in hours. Show it to potential customers. Get real feedback. Decide whether the idea has legs before investing serious money.

This is an enormous advantage. The number one reason business software projects fail is that they build the wrong thing. A vibe-coded prototype lets you fail fast and cheaply.

Internal Tools for Small Teams

Your team of five needs a simple tool to track inventory, log client calls, or manage a content calendar. Nobody outside your company will ever use it. The data is not particularly sensitive. If it goes down for a day, you fall back to a spreadsheet.

For this kind of use case, vibe coding can produce something perfectly adequate. It does not need to be bulletproof. It just needs to be better than the spreadsheet it replaced.

Automating Repetitive Personal Tasks

A script that renames files, formats a report, or pulls data from one system into another. Small automations that save you thirty minutes a day. These are ideal vibe coding targets — low stakes, high immediate value, easy to fix or replace if they break.

What Vibe Coding Is Bad For

Customer-Facing Applications

The moment external customers interact with your software, the requirements change dramatically. You need reliable uptime, proper security, data protection, error handling, and a level of polish that prototypes rarely have. Customers do not know the workarounds. They do not slack you when something breaks. They just leave.

Anything Handling Sensitive Data

Customer personal information, payment details, health records, financial data. These require proper security architecture — encryption, access controls, audit logging, compliance with privacy regulations. AI-generated code consistently cuts corners on security because security does not make demos look better.

Systems That Must Scale

If you expect your user base to grow from 10 to 1,000, the architecture decisions made by AI tools at the start will not survive the journey. Scaling requires deliberate choices about databases, caching, load handling, and infrastructure that prototyping tools do not make.

How to Evaluate Your Vibe-Coded Tool

If you already have an AI-built tool running in your business, here are five questions to assess whether it is good enough for what it does.

1. What Happens When It Breaks?

Seriously — have you tested this? Disconnect from the internet and try to use it. Enter nonsense data into a form. Open it in two browser tabs and submit conflicting changes. If the app crashes, freezes, or shows a blank screen, that is what your users (or your team) will experience the next time something unexpected happens.

2. Where Does the Data Live?

Ask whoever built it (or check yourself): is the data in a proper database service, or is it stored in a file on the server? Is it backed up? If the hosting platform restarts, does the data survive? If you cannot answer these questions with confidence, your business data is at risk.

3. Are There Any Automated Tests?

Tests are what prevent a fix to one thing from breaking something else. Most vibe-coded tools have zero tests. That means every change is a gamble. This is manageable for a simple tool, but it becomes a serious liability as the tool grows.

4. Can Someone Else Maintain It?

If the person who built it left tomorrow, could someone else pick it up? Is the code documented? Is it structured in a way that another developer could understand? AI-generated code is notoriously difficult for human developers to maintain because it lacks consistent patterns and architecture.

5. What Data Is It Handling?

If the answer includes customer names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, or payment information, you need to know how that data is protected. Is it encrypted? Who has access? Is there an audit trail? Does it comply with the Australian Privacy Act (or whatever regulations apply to your industry)?

The Smart Approach

Vibe coding is not inherently good or bad. It is a tool. Like any tool, it is brilliant when used for what it was designed for and dangerous when used for something it was not.

The smartest business owners we work with use vibe coding as the starting point, not the finish line. They build the prototype with AI. They test it with real users or real processes. They learn what works and what does not. Then, if the tool proves its value and the stakes justify it, they invest in building it properly.

The prototype is the sketch. Production software is the building. You would not move your family into a sketch, no matter how good it looked on the napkin. But you also would not start building without a sketch.

A Quick Decision Framework

Ask these three questions:

1. Who uses it? If only your internal team, and they number under 20, the prototype might be fine. If customers use it, it probably needs professional foundations.

2. What happens if it fails? If the answer is “we go back to spreadsheets for a day,” the stakes are low. If the answer is “we cannot bill customers” or “we lose client data,” the stakes are high.

3. Is it growing? If usage is stable and small, the prototype can stay. If usage is growing — more users, more data, more integrations — the prototype has an expiration date, and it is better to plan the upgrade before you hit it than to scramble after.

Vibe coding gave you the superpower of speed. The next superpower is knowing when speed needs to give way to solidity.