Vibe Coding in Production: Code That Compiles Is Not Code That Was Fine

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy posted a tweet that put a name to something that was already happening: "vibe coding" — describe an intent in natural language, accept whatever the AI generates, and move on without reading the diffs. A year later, Karpathy himself wrote that the term was already obsolete for professional use. His proposed replacement was "agentic engineering": orchestrating agents with active supervision, not riding the vibes — which, not coincidentally, is the subject of our previous article.

This article is not about whether vibe coding "works". It works, and works well, for what it was designed for. It is about what happens when an application built that way crosses the line from demo to production without anyone auditing that crossing — and about what concrete evidence, not speculation, exists today for what goes wrong when it does.