GoKawiilProponents of vibe coding argue LLMs democratize software development, allowing anyone to make their own apps. I've seen that firsthand. My neighbor used to work as a veterinary tech. She vibe coded an app to make tracking her senior cat's insulin shots easier. On the other side, critics argue vibe coding is producing vulnerable software. Extensive use can also make a codebase more difficult to maintain, since there's a good chance a vibe coder doesn't know enough about coding to fix an error if an LLM can't address it for them.
There is preliminary research that supports this argument. This past April, researchers from the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Georgia Tech scanned 43,000 security advisories and found 74 vulnerabilities they could trace directly back to AI-generated code. Of those, 14 were security issues the researchers deemed critical. That might not seem like a lot, but the 43,000 advisories only covered a three-month period at the start of the year. What's more, the team estimated that the real number of AI-generated vulnerabilities was likely five to 10 times higher due to the fact that they could only trace code that was properly disclosed as having been generated by an LLM.
These wouldn't be major issues if the practice was just popular among hobbyists, but there's growing evidence to suggest more professionals are turning to vibe coding despite their own reservations and those of their peers. A recent survey of 1,100 professional programmers who have tried AI tools found that 72 percent used AI coding tools every day, and that about 42 percent of their codebase was either AI-generated or -assisted. That same group predicts that AI-generated code will account for more than half of their codebase by next year.