Vibe Coded POCs are still POCs

While LinkedIn is truly a self-eggrandising hellscape, it does serve some purposes, one of which is providing a useful view into the psyche of the technology industry.

I recently came across a post that was discussing how vibe coding is a useful way to build demos and prototypes, but worrying about the risk of those systems making their way into production. This is true, but it’s not a problem that’s unique just to vibe coded stuff.

This issue has existed for as long as I have been programming, and believe me, I’ve fallen foul of it myself, but it really is as simple as don’t push POCs into production. It may seem like a good idea at the time, but I am yet to work in a team where the POC that made it into production wasn’t then just the accepted solution.

You often don’t get time to revisit things that are ostensibly working. But by then the horse has kinda bolted: who specified the thing? Was it adequately checked for security holes? Are there tests? Are they good tests? And so on…

Additionally, does it pass the “I’d be happy to support that” test? Vibe coded stuff still needs to be supported by the team that owns it, not just some random person in the org that happens to have publish rights to the domain!

I think the issue at hand here is that vibe coding stuff somehow makes it feel more “done” than it actually is. To use a bad analogy… Consider an onion. Your vibe coded thingy is the onion. Even though the onion looks good on the outside, but if you peel back the layers, you find the onion is rotten inside. And that’s a problem if you’re then putting the onion out on the kitchen table for some other poor soul to clean up. That’s not cool.

It really makes me worry about the state of things over the coming years with the likes of bolt.new and these industrialised vibe coding platforms, or companies saying that we don’t really need devs anymore because the PM can ship¹, because we’re pushing crap into production just kinda because we can.

As with any POC, whether that was made by your team or an LLM, it’s critical to recognise that POCs are to prove the point with a customer, test an integration, or something like that. It’s not a shortcut to production.