Vibe Coding: AI Is Writing the Code. Are You Owning the Risk?

If you’ve been anywhere near modern dev circles, you’ve probably heard the buzz around vibe coding. Coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, it captures a new workflow: instead of writing code line by line, you guide an AI through natural language prompts.

Think of it as the next evolution of AI-assisted development. 

You toss a prompt to an AI, it spits back a working prototype, and suddenly you’re clicking around an app you didn’t spend weeks hand-crafting. It’s intoxicating; the speed, the ease, the “what if we just try this” energy.

Sounds magical, right? And to be fair, it is magical… for demos. 

But here’s where the story shifts: 

what happens when that vibe-coded prototype suddenly needs to handle real users, real money, and real data?

That’s when the fun part stops.

The Security Cliff : Payments and Personal Data

The second you take vibe-coded software live with payments or user data, you fall off a cliff of hidden risks:

• Payment nightmares: AI might skip idempotency checks, mishandle retries, or forget to verify webhook signatures. Suddenly, you’ve got double charges or spoofed payment confirmations.

• Data privacy gaps: What looks like a working signup form may be storing passwords in plain text, leaking PII to logs, or leaving debug endpoints wide open.

• Silent vulnerabilities: The model could choose outdated libraries with known exploits or even hard-code API keys in source files.

• Compliance mismatch: PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA aren’t just acronyms, they’re laws. The AI won’t automatically enforce encryption at rest, data deletion policies, or audit logging. That’s on you.

These are just the obvious pitfalls, there are many more lurking in the details of every integration. 

The Velocity Trap

Vibe coding’s greatest appeal is speed. With a few well-phrased prompts, you can demo a fully functional checkout flow in a weekend.But the danger is mistaking movement for progress. 

A fast launch means nothing if you’re breached a week later, or if regulators come knocking because your system mishandled card data. Compliance standards like PCI DSS and privacy regulations such as GDPR demand encryption, audit logging, key management, and deletion policies that no AI will spontaneously invent.

Velocity only creates an advantage if it’s paired with durability. Without that balance, you’re not sprinting ahead of the competition, you’re sprinting straight into a wall.

What Leaders Should Be Asking

If you’re a founder, engineering leader, or product manager leaning on vibe coding, here are the hard questions to ask before you go live with payments or user data:

• Who is reviewing the AI-generated code for security flaws and regulatory compliance?

• Do we have tests, rate limiting, and monitoring to stop fraud or denial-of-service attacks?

• Are secrets and API keys safely stored or sitting in the repo?

• What happens when an attacker hits our payment endpoint 10,000 times in a row?

• Are we actually compliant with the regulations we’ve just stepped into?

• What’s the plan if a vulnerability is discovered after launch?

If the answers aren’t clear, you’re not ready.

A Smarter Way to Embrace Vibe Coding

I’m not anti-vibe coding. Far from it. It’s a powerful accelerant, and it has a real future in production systems. But only if we stop treating it as “autopilot” and start treating it like an assistant: fast, enthusiastic, and in need of constant review. 

Because “Vibe coding isn’t a substitute for fundamentals—it’s an amplifier of them.”

That means:

• Using vibe coding for scaffolding, not the final lockbox around your customers’ money.

• Layering in security reviews, automated scans, and compliance checks before you ship.

• Training teams to prompt for security, not just functionality.

• Building cultural guardrails so prototypes don’t sneak into production unvetted.

Because when you’re handling payments and personal data, the margin for error is zero.

My Perspective 

From my own experience building early-stage prototypes, the magic isn’t in “AI writes everything.” The magic is in AI plus disciplined engineering: creativity and speed, matched with rigorous security and governance.

So when you’re ready to take that vibe-coded prototype live, don’t just ask, “Does it work?” Ask, “Will it stay secure when the stakes are real?”

That’s the conversation every tech leader should be having before the vibe turns into a very expensive vibe-check. If you’re wrestling with that very question, I’d love to compare notes — reach out.