Short answer: no, vibe coding isn't bad. Shipping something in a weekend that would have taken a two-person team three months is not bad. What's bad is treating the first working preview as production.
The critique that misses the point
"Real developers write real code." Sure. Real developers also spend 40% of their time gluing forms to databases. If the AI can do that, and the AI is faster, the AI does it. The hand-written code was never the moat.
The critique that's actually correct
Every vibe-coded app we scan has the same three problems, and none of them are fixed by prompting harder:
- Security defaults are wrong. The model writes code that works. It does not verify the code is safe against the specific tenant model of your app.
- The marketing is generic. The model has read a million landing pages and averages them. Averages don't convert.
- The tells are visible. Default titles, template hero, boilerplate footer. Visitors clock it in 3 seconds.
The fix isn't "learn to code"
The fix is an audit step. Before you launch, pass the URL through a checker that knows what vibe-coded failures look like. That's the missing step in the workflow, and it's the entire reason WeVibe.fail exists.
Vibe code, then audit
Ship fast. Audit before you tweet. Fix the top three findings. That's the whole recipe.