Vibe Engineering - Reducing the risks of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding and Artificial Intelligence promise significant productivity gains, yet these come with risks, both from hallucinations, accidents and reduced developer productivity. By adding tried and trusted software engineering practices, Vibe Engineering can significantly reduce risks and offer a sustainable path for development whilst keeping many of the benefits of Vibe coding.

69% of AI agent users agree AI agents have increased productivity.

• Benefits of Vibe Coding
• Risks associated with Vibe Coding
• Benefits of Vibe Engineering
• Drawbacks to Vibe Engineering
• Vibe Engineering
• Quality Assurance
• Review your development framework
• Propose changes to Vibe Engineering

Benefits of Vibe Coding

84% of respondents to the StackOverflow survey 2025 are using AI tools

Vibe Coding like Rapid Application Development before it is delivering a Proof of Concept that turns blue sky thinking into something tangible that can be used to engage stakeholders and back a case for investing in a new product or service. Paying customers using a service validates the concept, proves viability and offers a viable road map for a profitable future.

Risks associated with Vibe Coding

Is your LLM using the latest version of your tools? As components and tools evolve they often add new features or change existing ones. It's essential to keep up to date for security and performance, sometimes this can be challenging. There have been horror stories of accidentally deleting client data, it's hard to recover from such a catastrophe.

Paying customers expect a minimum level of service as well as improvements. Once a service is live there needs to be a level of comfort that it will continue and grow without too many issues.

After clients have bought into your service, they expect reliability as well as improvements. Having established your client base it's often more useful to ensure stability, fix bugs and more carefully manage improvements.

In the age of Vibe Coding, risks that were acceptable during the initial phase become insufficient to guarantee long term viability. Promises are not enough and guarantees or insurance require evidence to support longer term viability.

Benefits of Vibe Engineering

Keeping many of the advantages of using LLMs to assist with development, Simon Willison coined the phrase Vibe Engineering. By adding a minimal set of tried and trusted software development practices ensures development is repeatable, significantly reducing errors reaching production, identifying issues earlier and facilitating debugging.

Drawbacks to Vibe Engineering

Reduces the speed of development and adds a number of extra tasks.

Vibe Coding to Vibe Engineering

Like many changes, it can be helpful to bring outside help to introduce changes quickly, reliably and integrate them into your environment with the minimum of disruption.

Vibe Engineering offers development at pace with significantly reduced risks.

It's unhelpful to over manage the development process so I offer a good starting point with my experience of building products, teams and a small subset of the collective knowledge of best practices and experience known as the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge SWEBOK.

For a more detailed about Vibe Engineering read the article Software Engineering in the age of LLMs.

The main modules are:

• Repeatability
• Productivity tools
• Change management
• Quality assurance
• Professional development
• Framework review
• Support

Repeatability

Offering methods and scripts to be able to reliably build apps in different environments.

Productivity tools

Humans and the data sets that train LLMs are fallible, tools such as linters and compilers are essential for working with LLMs and are much greater than the sum of their parts.

Coding is the easiest part of software development

Automated testing enables developers to take risks knowing other aspects are safe.

The tools and associated workflow depend on your codebase and environment.

Change management

All software has bugs, by introducing a minimal set of tools to separate and automate development, staging and production environments it's possible to significantly increase quality and reduce unwanted risks.

Quality assurance

More than continuous integration, QA offers significantly increased durability, reliability and reduces risks.

Without undue admin overhead, a set of QA tests will significantly increase durability, reliability and reduce risks.

Professional development

Teams can be any shape or size and growth tends to follow customer requirements, after all it's end clients that pay for it. Products and services benefit from both customer focus and technical focus so any team will inevitably coalesce around those two roles in addition to any administrative necessities.

Reviewing teams and proposing choices you might wish to consider as your project grows.

Framework review

It's critical to choose a good tech stack for development, it defines what you can do, how you work, how easy it is to hire and keep developers and how well they integrate with LLMs.

Although I have a personal preference with Django and Django REST with PostgreSQL, your choices will be guided by your current tech stack, your team and your products.

Support

As your project takes off, there will be a need for support, both for on-boarding and day to day issues including bugs and supporting users.

Far from being an inconvenience, these are golden opportunities to reduce churn, learn from your customers and plan for the future. As your project gains popularity and grows beyond a few simple tasks, calls on support need their own team. Although this can appear time consuming and expensive, getting the right people is crucial to accelerating the flywheel effect.

What I offer:

Thinking of adding engineering stability and reassurance to your team? Contact me for an informal chat.