How does vibe coding actually work?
You tell a coding agent or an app builder what you want, run what comes back, and say what to change, in a loop. No architecture review, no reading diffs, no mental model of the code. The person supplies intent and taste; the model supplies every line of implementation. For prototypes, internal utilities, and first drafts, this is dramatically faster than writing code, which is why the practice outgrew the joke it started as.
Where does vibe coding break down?
Wherever someone has to maintain, secure, or extend the result. Code nobody read accumulates duplicated logic, silent edge-case failures, and vulnerabilities that only surface under adversarial input. The common failure is not the first version but the tenth change, when no human holds a model of how the system works. Vibe coding trades understanding for speed, and the debt comes due at maintenance time, a trade worth making consciously rather than by default.
Vibe coding vs agentic coding: what is the difference?
The loop is the same; the discipline differs. Agentic coding keeps the engineering practices around the agent: tests gate the merge, a person reviews what ships, execution stays in a sandbox. Vibe coding drops those controls on purpose. One is a development method, the other is a prototyping mode, and teams get in trouble when a vibe-coded prototype quietly becomes the production system.
Should a business let people vibe code?
Yes, inside a boundary. It is the cheapest way to test an idea, automate a personal workflow, or show a vendor what you actually want, before coding stops being the bottleneck matters to your roadmap. Draw the line where the output touches customers, money, or company data, and require real review from that point on.