The Dark Side of Vibe Coding

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

I've been creating websites, blogs, WordPress themes, and more since 2008. I dabbled a bit in Python and Perl. I had computer science courses in college.

But of course, now, I mostly build sites, projects, and even apps with AI. And ever since I started, I trust other people's apps less. A lot less.

So this is the dark side of vibe coding, few people talk about.

Many write about the slop flooding the App Store, the jobs, the security holes, even legal issues which I point out often as well. All fair. All true and important.

But my problem today is a different one. It's trust.

Blind trust

Before vibe coding, before AI, before countless people who never wrote a single line of code ever built entire production apps with backend, checkout, data policies, and legal contract, I trusted most programs blindly. Maybe that was a bit naive too. But I think most of you were doing the same.

If I needed an app for something, I went looking on the web or in the app stores, downloaded it, tested it, and if it looked fine, I used it, and sometimes paid for it.

This came with trust involved. If an app asked for full disk access, I thought about it for a second, but more often than not, I clicked Allow.

If a tool wanted to clean up my Library folder, go ahead. If it wanted to "free" my disk space or "clean" my Mac. Sure, go ahead.

I assumed there was a team behind it. Developers who knew what they were doing, some testing, someone who checked the delete function twice. Quality control of sorts.

I didn't know much about deep programming back then. So the code was a black box, mostly. And I figured the black box was probably fine.

It was. I guess. Most of the time. But now...

What I know now

Then I started (vibe-)coding with Claude Code, Codex, and co. And I saw two things.

First, how fast it goes. Increasingly so. You describe an app, and a working version shows up. Buttons, settings, a nice icon. It looks finished.

Second, how many mistakes are in there. Code that looks clean and does the wrong thing. A check that's missing. An edge case nobody thought of.

Case in point: Veracode tested more than 100 AI models on 80 coding tasks, and the code introduced security vulnerabilities in 45 percent of cases.

45 percent.

I catch a lot of that now, because I know this and try to read what the AI writes. Not everything, but a lot. And I've known for a while that AI doesn't think about privacy laws unless you tell it to.

Many people who vibe code an app don't read the code. Most I would assume. Many can't even. That's kind of the point of vibe coding. Which is cool in one way, but terrifying in another.

Everywhere

There are a lot of vibe-coded apps now.

Nearly 600,000 new apps showed up in the App Store in 2025, up 30 percent from the year before, after years of decline. And early 2026 jumped again, by 84 percent. The Information, who reported the numbers, thinks most of them likely rely on AI tools.

I would guess so too.

The problem: you can't tell. The App Store page doesn't say "vibe coded." The icon looks fine. The screenshots look fine. The reviews might even be five stars.

So I have to assume any new app could be one. Even the ones from big developers or companies that weren't before.

Where I hesitate

For a to-do app or a weather widget, I don't worry much. Worst case, a list disappears. Even though that would already suck.

It's different when an app does something that's hard to undo:

• It changes my system in a big way
• It deletes files
• It handles sensitive data, like passwords, money, or health stuff

There, I'm a lot more careful now than I was before vibe coding. And a bit anxious, to be honest. Where I used to just click, I stop and think about who might have built this. And how.

The more I know about how apps get built today, the less I trust them blindly.

Of course...

This isn't fair to the developers who use AI carefully. Who read the code, test it, and fix what the AI got wrong. I hope I'm one of them. From the outside, my apps look exactly like the weekend ones.

Also, vibe-coders don't do this on purpose. They're not evil. They just don't know any better.

And apps had bugs before AI too. A lot of them. My old trust was never really earned, I have to admit that. I just didn't know any better.

So maybe being careful is the healthier default. Feels worse, though. Because it feels like the trust is gone.

It also costs time. I skip tools now that are probably fine. Some of them were probably great.

Bottom Line

Vibe coding is great. I use it a lot and I'm not stopping.

But it took something away I didn't know I had. That easy, blind trust in software.

I don't think it's coming back. Do you still trust your apps?

If you're not already, follow me on Medium.