Vibe Coding Is a White Elephant for Anything Public-Facing
Vibe coding is great for prototypes and internal tools. For a real public product with users, money, and data, it quietly becomes a liability. Here is where the line is.
By Dipankar Sinha
Let me start by saying what vibe coding is good at, because it is genuinely useful and I do not want to sound like someone who hates new tools.
Vibe coding is when you build software by describing what you want to an AI and accepting what it gives you, without really reading the code. For a quick prototype, an internal dashboard, a script only you will ever run, or a demo to see if an idea is worth pursuing, it is wonderful. You get to an answer in hours instead of weeks.
The trouble starts when people take that same approach and point it at a real, public product. A B2C app with actual customers, real money, and real personal data. That is where vibe coding turns into a white elephant: impressive to look at, expensive to keep, and hard to get rid of.
The demo lies to you, kindly
A vibe-coded app demos beautifully. That is the whole problem. It looks finished, so it feels finished. But "looks finished" and "safe to put in front of the public" are two very different bars, and the gap between them is exactly the part you skipped by not reading the code.
Here is what usually hides in that gap.
Security holes you cannot see. Public apps get poked at, constantly, by bots and by people. Vibe-coded code tends to leave doors open: weak login, data that anyone can read if they change a number in the address bar, secrets left sitting in the code. The AI will not warn you, because it does not know your app is public. You find out when someone else does.
It falls over under real load. Ten users is not a hundred is not ten thousand. Code that works for your test account often buckles the first time real traffic arrives, because nobody thought about what happens when a thousand people click at once. The demo never tested that. Your launch day will.
No error handling, so small problems become outages. When something unexpected happens, and in public it always does, well-built software fails gently. Vibe-coded software tends to fail loudly and completely, showing users a broken screen or, worse, someone else's data.
You cannot fix it when it breaks. This is the quiet killer. When a real bug hits at 11pm, you need someone who understands the code to fix it fast. If nobody read the code in the first place, nobody can. You are left asking the AI to repair a thing it half-remembers, while your customers wait.
The data problem is not optional
If your public app touches personal data, and almost every B2C app does, you are not just making an engineering choice. You are taking on a legal duty.
In India, the DPDP Act sets real rules about consent, security, and what you must do before you go live. Vibe coding does not know about any of that. It will not ask you whether you collected consent properly, whether you can delete a user's data on request, or whether you told people what you are doing with their information. Those obligations do not disappear because a tool skipped them. They just become your problem the day a regulator or a user asks.
If you are anywhere near this, our DPDP readiness checklist walks you through the controls you need in place before launch, in plain language.
Where the line actually is
I am not telling you to write everything by hand. I use these tools too. The line is not "AI good" or "AI bad." It is about what the software has to survive.
- Throwaway or internal, and only you or your team use it? Vibe code away. Speed is the point, and the downside is small.
- A prototype to test an idea, that you will rebuild if it works? Perfect use. Just be honest that it is a prototype.
- Public, with real users, real money, or real personal data? Now the rules change. The code has to be understood, tested, secured, and maintainable. That does not mean slow, and it does not mean no AI. It means someone senior is reading what the AI produced and standing behind it.
The mistake I keep seeing is a great prototype getting quietly promoted to a real product without anyone deciding to cross that line. It just drifts across, one happy demo at a time, until it is live and nobody can maintain it.
What to do instead
If you have a vibe-coded prototype that customers are starting to use, you are actually in a good spot. You have proof the idea works. That is the expensive thing to find out, and you found it out cheaply.
The move now is not to keep piling features onto the prototype. It is to take what you learned and rebuild the parts that matter, properly, with someone who reads the code. Often that is faster and cheaper than trying to save a foundation that was never meant to carry a house. I wrote about a very similar trap in building with AI, where the second version is the hard one.
The bottom line
Vibe coding is a fantastic way to find out if something is worth building. It is a dangerous way to run something people depend on.
Use it to learn fast and cheap. When real users show up, treat that as the signal to build for real, not the signal that you already have.
Have a vibe-coded product that is getting real users, and a nagging feeling it is not ready for them? That feeling is usually right. Book a 30-minute call and we will look at what is safe to keep and what needs rebuilding before it costs you.