Vibe Code Governance
Work TransformationProvisional
The organizational challenge of evaluating, integrating, and maintaining AI-generated or vibe-coded artifacts produced by non-engineers (e.g., subject matter experts, product managers), which appear functional on the surface but lack documentation of intent, design system alignment, or user-centered rationale, creating downstream problems for the teams responsible for quality and coherence
Evidence
“Yeah, that is also happening and I haven't talked about that yet. I mean this is almost like very detailed product documentation but it's also that we have sort of a process of them going through AI to come up with that and then come up with the technical details to start implementing it. Also they are vibe coding some of those interfaces and sharing them with me and the team, and that's been its own interesting challenge. How so? Tell me more about that. So I think there are a few aspects of it. In [our customers' industry] I think the bar in terms of end UI design is not always terribly high and so when someone vibe codes a design, puts it out there like "oh we're done, look, so and so did it, it's there," and I start looking at it and there are some things on the surface that are fine and they're working and maybe there are a few good ideas that I haven't thought of too.”
“But then you start to peel away the surface and there's so much that doesn't make sense in terms of what we're doing and the layout in addition to just like maybe the design system we're using. It doesn't map to the design system we've already established. And so there's all those aspects of it, but then there's even translating the domain and the intent into the interface that I never, like sometimes I'll just, in the past maybe I'll get handed one of these live coded interfaces without that context and I'll have to go back, either I'll have to do my best to extract that intent out of the interface or I'll have to go back and ask 20 questions just to figure out what was going on. And so this is something I sort of have unsuccessfully proposed which is that we do a better job of documenting our intent if anybody's going to be vibe coding interfaces and put some structure to that so that we can say, okay, so and so made an example of this application, what were you thinking, what were you hoping to accomplish, and with the idea that maybe if that was documented we could assess it together and see whether it was working.”