Vibe coding has taken the development world by storm—and it truly is a modern marvel to behold. The problem is, the vibe coding rush is going to leave a lot of apps broken in its wake once people move on to the next craze. At the end of the day, many of us are going to be left with apps that are broken with no fixes in sight.
A lot of vibe “coders” are really just prompt typers
And they’ve never touched a line of code
Vibe coding made development available to the masses like never before. You can simply take an AI tool, type a prompt into a text box, and out pops an app. It probably needs some refinement, but, typically, version one is still functional whenever you’re vibe coding.
The problem comes from “developers” who have never written a line of code. They’re just using vibe coding because it’s cool or they think they can make a quick buck, but they really have no knowledge of development—or any desire to learn proper development.
Think of those types of vibe coders as people who realize they can use a calculator and online tools to solve math problems for them, so they try to build a rocket. They might be able to make something work in some way, but they’ll never reach the moon, even though they think they can.
Anyone can vibe code a prototype
But you really need to know what you’re doing to build for the long haul
For those who don’t know what they’re doing, vibe coding is a fantastic way to build a prototype. I’ve vibe coded several projects so far, and out of everything I’ve done, I’ve realized one thing—vibe coding is only as good as the person behind the keyboard. I have spent more time debugging the fruits of my vibe coding than I have actually vibe coding.
Each project that I’ve built with vibe coding could have easily been “viable” within an hour or two, sometimes even less time than that. But, to make something of actual quality, it has always taken many, many hours.
Vibe coding is definitely faster than traditional coding if you’re a one-man team, but it’s not something that is fast by any means if you’re after a quality product. The same goes for continued updates.
I’ve spent the better part of three months building a weather app for iPhone. It’s a simple app, but it also has quite a lot of complex things going on in the background.
It recently got released in the App Store—no small feat at all. But, I still get a few crash reports a week, and I’m constantly squashing bugs and working on new features for the app. This is because I’m planning on supporting the app for a long time, not just the weekend I released it, and that takes a lot more work.
Vibe coders often jump from app to app without thinking of longevity
The app was a weekend project, after all
I’ve seen it far too often, a vibe coder touting that they built this “complex app” in 48 hours, as if that is something to be celebrated. Sure, it’s cool that a working version of an app was up and running in two days, but how well does it work? How many bugs are still in it? Are there race conditions that cause a random crash?
My weather app has a weird race condition right now I’m tracking down. It crashes, on occasion, when opened from Spotlight on an iPhone. Not every time does that cause a crash, just sometimes.
If a vibe coder’s only goal is to build apps in short amounts of time so they can brag about how fast they built the app, they likely aren’t going to take the time to fix little things like that.
I don’t vibe code my apps that way, and I know many other vibe coders that aren’t that way—but we all started with actual coding, not typing a prompt.
Anyone can be a vibe coder, but not all vibe coders are developers
“And when everyone’s super… no one will be.” – Syndrome, The Incredibles. It might be from a kids’ movie, but it rings true in the era of vibe coding. When everyone thinks they can build an app in a weekend, everyone thinks they’re a developer.
By contrast, not every vibe coder is actually a developer, and that’s the problem. It’s hard to know if the app you’re using was built by someone who has plans to support the app long-term or not—and that’s why there’s going to be a lot of broken apps in the future.
I can see it now, the apps that people built in a weekend as a challenge will simply go without updates. While the app might work for the first few weeks or months just fine, an API update comes along and breaks the app’s compatibility. It’s at that point we’ll see who was vibe coding to build an app versus who was vibe coding just for online clout—and the sad part is, consumers will lose out more often than not with broken apps.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
