Vibe coding promises a great future, the app you always wanted to build, but funds, time or knowledge wasn’t there. Well, now you can have a working app in just days with no coding experience needed, just a subscription to the latest AI tools. It all starts off so well, screens start taking shape, your changes are understood and implemented before your eyes. No need for a computer science degree, long nights tackling technical problems and browsing Stack Overflow, or reading documentation that would put you to sleep. But then the bugs started…
Suddenly, the dream starts to fall apart as more bugs pop up as one is fixed, and you find yourself stuck in a loop, saying the same thing with an increasing amount of caps lock being used. So is vibe coding the future of software development, or are we being sold a broken dream?
In the past, software was built using a waterfall methodology, requirements were given, then designs were made, it was built and tested, and then the product was released. It was slow, rigid and offered no chance for feedback until all the work was completed. But it was predictable and easier to manage.
Then came the new buzzword, agile. Software teams would change to deploying individual features instead of entire applications, feedback could be given throughout, ideas could change, and teams could pivot to new ideas or features more easily. Sometimes ideas would keep creeping, causing increasing costs, and the rituals what where proposed with it, sometimes bought back the rigidity it promised to resolve. But overall, this seems to be an improvement and has become the standard approach to building applications.
But still, agile generally takes teams of people with years of experience working together to create software, which always ends up being more expensive than you would want. The appeal of vibe coding an application, just a founder and a machine. appeals greatly, with ultimate control and low starting costs gives low risk proposition to reach the next hit app, giving you the passive income we dream of.
Vibe-coding is great for building momentum, to get your ideas out into the world, a way to demo them, show investors or get a feel for how your ideas should look and feel. They are great for a prototype or hackathons. Coding with just prompts and vibes can be a great first step in creating apps, even for software developers with decades of experience. The problems arrises form seeing it as an entire methodology to bring production-level software to fruition, instead of as a first step in the process.
Does any of these parts sound familiar? One bug is fixed, and two more replace it. You feel stuck in a loop and can't progress further. It works on my computer, but I don’t know how to release it.
This is where the dream can feel like it's falling apart. You're not building anymore, but firefighting issues. Maybe you’ve become scared to touch things in case more things break. Or maybe there's a feeling in the back of your mind that, although it looks to be working, you don’t quite trust what's happening. Beyond this, security can be a major issue in AI-generated apps, which, when released, you will be liable for if your users' data can be easily exposed.
“Software development isn’t hard because code is difficult. It’s hard because deciding what the code should do — consistently — is.”
One misconception about software development is that it is just writing code. But it doesn’t take long working in the industry to realise this is often the easier part. It takes some time and patience to learn, but once you come to understand the syntax and rules, the challenge is no longer writing the code (the AI can do that part easily). Its defining features, business logic, and expectations clearly enough that the system behaves the same way tomorrow as it does today.
Vibecoding has been amazing for starting, your ideas are no longer in your head, there are written in code and can be shown to the world, but the polish you imagined is getting harder to achieve. This isn’t a failure. It’s simply time for a new approach. Scaling requires intention, structure and experience. This is where software development agencies like Shape can help. We can audit what you have made, help you lock down you core business logic, make suddgestions for improvement's based on experience, and add tests to keep what currently works working.
