Shadow IT

Your Vibe Coders Are Not Building Tools

July 23, 2026

They Are Filing Bug Reports Against Your Company

A while back I met an old colleague for cocktails. We do this every so often - two people who have seen enough server rooms and steering committees to know that the best incident reviews happen over a Negroni.

He was in a great mood. His company's vibe coding (quickly developing software using AI like Claude without writing (or sometimes even understanding) the code itself) adoption was through the roof. And not just among developers - consultants, architects, support engineers, basically anyone with a pulse and a Claude license was building tools. Management was celebrating. They threw around numbers like trophies: one engineer burned through 100 dollars a day in tokens. Applause. High fives. Slide decks.

And honestly? Fair enough. If a 100-dollar-a-day token bill produces a tool that saves ten hours of engineering time per week, that's the cheapest employee you ever hired. I am not here to rain on token budgets. Fun fact on the side: "vibe coding" went from a casual Karpathy tweet to Collins Dictionary Word of the Year within roughly twelve months. That's faster adoption than most companies manage for a new expense tool.

But while my colleague was celebrating, I was doing what 20+ years in support trenches trains you to do: listening for the alarm underneath the applause.