When Vibe Coding Hits the Wall.
Recently, we onboarded a new customer who came to us in distress. They had attempted to build a large, business-critical application using low-code and “vibe coding” tools like Lovable. ‘Vibe’ tools claim to allow you to describe what you want to AI and it will just build you an app without you having to know about code, or infrastructure.
At first, everything seemed promising. Progress was fast, features appeared quickly, and demos looked impressive. But as the application grew, the cracks began to show.
What they experienced is something we’ve seen repeatedly. These tools are genuinely powerful for rapid prototyping, and hobbyist projects. They excel at getting you about 80% of the way there with remarkable speed. The problem is the last 20%.
As requirements became more complex — performance tuning, security constraints, edge-case handling, integrations, and long-term maintainability — the platform started working against them. Workarounds piled up, debugging became opaque, the Lovable agents lost track of what the aim was, and critical limitations surfaced with no clear path forward. What should have been incremental improvements turned into blockers.
That’s where we stepped in. We helped stabilise the system, move it into a business-level AI-first approach. We took the prototype, helped the customer understand the path forward, and re-built the fragile application. Now, the core of the application is rebuilt in a way that could actually scale and be supported in production across Google Cloud, AWS or Digital Ocean cloud hosting.
Our takeaway from this lesson remains consistent: vibe coding tools are fine accelerators, but they lack real enterprise credibility today. Speed is valuable — but only if you can actually cross the finish line. Does this sound like something you want to know more about? We’d love to talk