The difference between production software and vibe-coded slop isn't the AI model
· 7 min read
Spend ten minutes on r/vibecoding and you'll see the same story on repeat. Someone ships a full stack app in a weekend, posts the demo, gets the upvotes. Two weeks later they're back: three copies of the auth flow, API keys in the frontend, a database with no migrations, and a folder structure only the model that wrote it could navigate.
The common diagnosis is that AI writes bad code. But think about how a real engineering team works. No code reaches production without architecture standards, CI, code review, and branch protection. A junior engineer doesn't get to wire the frontend directly to the database, skip migrations, or commit API keys to the repo. The team's process prevents it.
Why would AI be any different?