Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI model write the code, judging the output by whether it runs rather than by reading every line. Andrej Karpathy named the practice in February 2025, and Collins Dictionary made it Word of the Year for 2025. It works well for prototypes and demos. Production is where it stops, which is the gap Major addresses with SSO, permissions, audit, a managed database, and storage.

Is vibe coding safe for production?

Not as-is. For prototypes, demos, and internal experiments it is fine, but code that touches real data needs review, proper secrets handling, and a real deployment foundation across data, integrations, security, and runtime. Generation is the easy part. Major supplies the foundation, so a described app arrives in production with permissions and audit already attached rather than bolted on later.

Do you need to know how to code to vibe code?

No, not to generate the code. Describing what you want in plain language is enough to produce a working app. Shipping it safely is a separate question that takes either engineering judgment to review the output and wire up the foundation, or a platform that handles permissions, secrets, hosting, and state. Major is the second option.

What is the difference between vibe coding and AI-assisted engineering?

Vibe coding means accepting an AI model's code because it runs, with little or no review. AI-assisted engineering keeps a human owning and reviewing every line that ships. Simon Willison drew the line in March 2025: if you read the code, understand it, and could explain it to someone else, you are doing AI-assisted engineering.

What are the best vibe coding tools?

The commonly used ones are Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Lovable, Replit, and GitHub Copilot. Each generates code from natural language and they differ mostly in how close they keep you to the actual files. None solves production on its own. Major covers that second half, turning a described app into governed production software with hosting, database, RBAC, and audit handled.

How do you take a vibe-coded app to production?

Review the generated code, move every secret behind a credential broker, put real authentication and role-based access in front of it, give it durable storage instead of in-memory state, and add logging you can audit. Those five things are where prototypes stall. Major handles them as platform defaults from the first deploy.

What Is Vibe Coding? From Front-End Demos to Production Agents

Vibe coding turned "describe it and ship it" into a real workflow, but most vibe-coded apps never reach safe production. Here is what vibe coding actually is, where it breaks, and how the same idea extends to building AI agents on real enterprise data.

Rahul RamakrishnanJune 17, 2026Updated October 21, 2026

Hand-drawn website wireframe on paper beside a pen on a desk, the start of a vibe-coded app

Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI model write the code, judging the result by whether it runs rather than by reading every line. It is excellent for prototypes and risky for anything that touches real company data. Major is the enterprise platform where agents build the software they run on, so a described app or agent ships on a governed foundation of SSO, permissions, audit, a managed database, and storage instead of arriving in production bare.

What vibe coding actually is

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy described a new way of working: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." You prompt, the model writes, you run it, you describe what looks wrong, the model rewrites. The code is a means. The working behavior is the point.

Simon Willison drew the useful boundary in March 2025: vibe coding is building software with an LLM without reviewing the code it writes. Once you read the output, understand it, and take responsibility for it, you are doing AI-assisted engineering. Willison's own rule is that he will not commit code he could not explain to someone else.

The term spread fast. Collins Dictionary named "vibe coding" its Word of the Year for 2025, which tells you the practice has left the lab.

Why it matters now

For most of software history, turning an idea into running software required someone who could write the code. For a large class of small applications, that gate is gone. A product manager can describe an internal dashboard and watch it appear. An operations lead can build a check-in tool the morning of an event.

The cost of producing a working front end fell close to zero. The cost of everything that makes software safe to run did not move. That gap is the rest of this article.

Vibe coding vs. AI-assisted engineering

The two get blurred, usually by people selling one of them. The dividing line is review.

Traditional coding: a developer writes every line, reviews fully, and the result suits systems maintained for years.
AI-assisted engineering: a developer directs an LLM and owns every line that ships. Fast, with a human accountable.
Vibe coding: the model writes from prompts and you judge by behavior. Fastest, with light to no review, so it fits prototypes, demos, and throwaway tools.

Both of the AI paths are legitimate. Trouble starts when you use one where the other belongs.

The tools

The commonly used ones are Cursor (an AI-first editor that keeps you close to the files), Claude Code (a terminal and IDE agent that edits real source), Codex (OpenAI's coding agent), Lovable (full front-end apps from a prompt), Replit (browser-based building and hosting), and GitHub Copilot (in-editor completion and chat, closer to AI-assisted engineering). Each is good at generating. None of them decides whether the result is safe to put in front of a customer.

Where vibe coding breaks

Generating the app is the visible part. The foundation underneath is where projects stall, and it falls into four buckets.

Data and storage: schemas, migrations, backups, and keeping one tenant's data away from another's.
Integrations: OAuth flows, schema mapping, pagination, retries, and rate limits.
Security and governance: SSO, an RBAC matrix that is actually enforced, audit logs, and secrets that rotate.
Runtime and hosting: deploys, environment variables, version pinning, and logs you can read when something breaks.

None of this shows up in the demo. All of it shows up in production. We have watched the same failures ship at mid-market companies: a Salesforce token committed straight to git, a cleanup script that wiped the volume the backups lived on, an intern who could read the renewals pipeline because access control was a dropdown in the UI rather than a filter on the query. Each ran fine in the demo. Each was a foundation problem, and you cannot prompt your way out of it after the fact.

Beyond the front end: vibe coding agents

The larger frontier is pointing the same describe-it workflow at agents and automations that act on company data. Describing an agent that reads a CRM, reasons about a deal, and updates a record is a bigger promise than describing a dashboard, because the generated thing now takes actions against systems of record. Generation is just as easy. The foundation matters more.

There is also a cost problem. An agent that re-reasons the same task on every run is probabilistic, expensive in tokens, and hard to audit. The better pattern is the one Major is built on: the agent reasons once, builds an app for the repeatable part, and runs the app from then on. Reason once. Run forever.

Build vibe-coded apps and agents on Major

Major gives both levels of this idea one foundation. A person describes an internal app and it ships to production in minutes. An agent builds the same kind of app to do its own work. Here is what that looks like for a renewals workflow:

Connectors: Salesforce for accounts and opportunities, Gmail for outreach drafts, and Slack for approvals, each attached with scoped credentials so no token ever sits in code or in git.
The app that holds state: a renewals app with its own managed database and storage, holding account history, risk scores, and drafted notes, so work resumes instead of living in a context window that disappears.
The agent and its judgment: the agent builds the app once, runs it on each cycle, and spends reasoning only where judgment is needed, such as deciding whether an account is at risk and how to word the outreach.
The trigger: a scheduled workflow runs the app weekly, with a Slack approval step before anything is sent.
Governance: SSO, role-based access enforced on the query, and audit logs cover every action, so you can reconstruct who or what did what, and under whose credentials.

The build tool stays swappable. Major's web editor, the Major CLI, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex can all sit on top, and the platform underneath supplies the foundation. You can start building on Major and describe your first app today.

Common misconceptions

"Vibe coding means code review is dead." Review moved. For a throwaway prototype you can skip it. For anything touching real data, someone or something still has to account for what the code does before it ships.

"Vibe coding replaces engineers." It replaces the first draft. Judgment about what is safe to run, what data it can touch, and what happens on failure is the part it does not supply.

"If it runs, it is done." Running is where the question starts. A Salesforce token in git runs perfectly until the day it leaks.

Our position

Vibe coding democratized generation. It did not democratize shipping. The fix is a platform that owns the foundation generators skip, because the generators are already good. To be honest about the edges: Major is not a code generator competing with Cursor or Lovable, and it does not remove the need for someone to own what the software does. It removes the need to assemble the production plumbing by hand.

Start building on Major

Describe an internal app or an agent workflow and ship it with SSO, permissions, a managed database, and audit already in place.

Frequently asked questions

What is vibe coding?: Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI model write the code, judging the output by whether it runs rather than by reading every line. Andrej Karpathy named the practice in February 2025, and Collins Dictionary made it Word of the Year for 2025. It works well for prototypes and demos. Production is where it stops, which is the gap Major addresses with SSO, permissions, audit, a managed database, and storage.
Is vibe coding safe for production?: Not as-is. For prototypes, demos, and internal experiments it is fine, but code that touches real data needs review, proper secrets handling, and a real deployment foundation across data, integrations, security, and runtime. Generation is the easy part. Major supplies the foundation, so a described app arrives in production with permissions and audit already attached rather than bolted on later.
Do you need to know how to code to vibe code?: No, not to generate the code. Describing what you want in plain language is enough to produce a working app. Shipping it safely is a separate question that takes either engineering judgment to review the output and wire up the foundation, or a platform that handles permissions, secrets, hosting, and state. Major is the second option.
What is the difference between vibe coding and AI-assisted engineering?: Vibe coding means accepting an AI model's code because it runs, with little or no review. AI-assisted engineering keeps a human owning and reviewing every line that ships. Simon Willison drew the line in March 2025: if you read the code, understand it, and could explain it to someone else, you are doing AI-assisted engineering.
What are the best vibe coding tools?: The commonly used ones are Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Lovable, Replit, and GitHub Copilot. Each generates code from natural language and they differ mostly in how close they keep you to the actual files. None solves production on its own. Major covers that second half, turning a described app into governed production software with hosting, database, RBAC, and audit handled.
How do you take a vibe-coded app to production?: Review the generated code, move every secret behind a credential broker, put real authentication and role-based access in front of it, give it durable storage instead of in-memory state, and add logging you can audit. Those five things are where prototypes stall. Major handles them as platform defaults from the first deploy.