Vibe Coding is a Massive Opportunity. But Let's Talk About the Risk.

If you've spent any time on social media lately, you'll have seen the posts. Someone built an app in 24 hours. It's generating six figures a month. They have no technical background. No developer. No agency. Just vibes.

And honestly? A lot of that is real. Vibe coding has democratised software development in a way that wasn't possible just a few years ago. As a business owner, you can now build tools and platforms you could only have dreamed of before - without spending a fortune on a developer to realise that vision. That is a genuine, significant opportunity and I don't want to undersell it.

But there's something most people aren't talking about. And it would be remiss of me not to.

The part the hype leaves out

When we vibe code, we're relying on AI to generate the application for us. Most of us aren't developers. We don't have a deep understanding of what's going into the back end. We describe what we want, the AI builds it and - if it looks right and seems to work - we ship it.

The problem is that "looks right" and "is secure" are not the same thing.

If you're building something for personal use, or a simple internal tool, the stakes are relatively low. But if you're building an application that's intended for public use - where real people are signing up, sharing data and potentially paying for access - the onus is on you to understand whether what you've built is actually secure. And most of us, if we're being honest, have no idea.

What this actually means in practice

Take multi-tenant applications as an example. A multi-tenant app is one where multiple users or businesses share the same underlying infrastructure - think a SaaS product where each customer has their own account and their own data.

In that kind of application, something as fundamental as row level security in your database is what prevents one customer's data from being visible to another. It's not glamorous. It's not the kind of thing that makes it into a 24-hour build video. But if it's not in place, you have a serious problem.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI-generated code won't always get this right. And if you don't know to check, you won't know it's missing.

So what should you actually do?

This isn't an argument against vibe coding. It's an argument for going in with your eyes open.

For smaller tools and internal projects, the risk profile is lower and the opportunity is real - get building.

For anything more complex... anything where customers are trusting you with their data and their money... it may be worth bringing in a developer who understands what's happening under the bonnet. Not to build the whole thing necessarily, but to audit what's been built and catch what the AI missed. The cost of that review is considerably less than the cost of a data breach, a lawsuit or a reputational hit you can't recover from.

Vibe coding has changed what's possible for entrepreneurs. That's not hype - it's true. But the tools have moved faster than the conversation about responsibility has. So whilst everyone else is talking about the opportunity, I think it's worth also talking about this.

Build the thing. Just make sure you know what you've built.

If you're learning to build with AI and want to do it properly, come and join us at Vibe Coding Lab. We build real things and we talk about the stuff that actually matters.