Vibe Coded Apps in Enterprise: The New Tech Debt
There’s been a rapid proliferation of vibe-coding platforms since Bolt, Lovable, and Replit opened the floodgates. Everyone’s chasing the same promise: take a prompt, wire a few data sources, ship a TypeScript front end, and - voilà - an app.
Two camps have emerged:
UI-first: Lovable, Orchids, Bolt, Google Stitch, Figma Make
Full-stack-first: Replit, v0 (Vercel), Emergent, Rocket
Add OpenAI Codex, Anthropic Claude Code and a few coding unicorns like Cursor, Devin, Cline, Factory into the mix, and you’ve got a crowded field with real utility and a ton of duplication. That’s the good part. The hard part is how enterprises absorb - or don’t absorb - this tidal wave.
I had coffee with a Fortune-500 CIO in New York last week. This is what he told me:
“We got a free vibe-coding license from one of the leading players, and I opened it up to my whole company. Within a couple of weeks we had close to 2,000 apps. Now I don’t know what’s in production and what’s prototype. I don’t know which apps touch internal data and which call external services. I can already see this adding enormous tech debt. Whatever custom-app debt we collected over the last ten years, I think we’ll collect again in three months.”
That line - “collect again in three months” - is the beat you can’t ignore. It reframes the problem.
We used to have a term called “rogue servers”, still do, I guess. When AWS made it super easy to launch EC2 machines, the IT teams went crazy and started launching tons of servers, which they never shut down. Now with vibe-coding platforms, the unit of risk has changed from a VM to an application with API tokens, credentials, and direct hooks into business systems. And because these platforms optimize for speed and delightful developer experiences, the typical enterprise guardrails often never get wired in.
You could try to lock them down. But that’s harder than it sounds. We’re talking about a workflow that goes from a natural language prompt straight to a TypeScript front end. There are only so many guardrails you can bolt on after the fact.
Meanwhile, the data stack vendors are watching. Snowflake and Databricks - yes, they’re licking their lips. Every one of these quick apps wants its own data store, its own dataset. So the inevitable loop looks like this: fast app → app data → warehouse ingestion → more ETL. That means more recurring ETL work, more schemas to reconcile, and more reasons for companies to re-invest in their central data platforms.
One other consequence is plain to see: the role of the data engineer and ETL owner goes from nice-to-have to mission-critical. If every team can spin an app in weeks, someone still must make sense of those app outputs, stitch them into the canonical data model, and manage lineage and compliance. The human effort doesn’t go away - it relocates and multiplies.
So here’s the thread I’m pulling at: vibe coding accelerates innovation, yes. But it also accelerates the accumulation of tech debt - not as forgotten servers, but as thousands of small apps with privileges, datasets, and unclear lifecycles. That changes where enterprise risk lives and who will be responsible for cleaning it up.
No vendor call to action. No checklist. Just a thought: the next wave of technology risk won’t look like old shadow IT. It will look like a thousand delightful apps, each quietly creating a new corner of your data estate. I’m just sharing that observation.
BTW, I love vibe-coding. My personal favorite is Lovable.