Writing

    Vibe Coding Rescue: When AI-Generated Code Needs a CTO

    How teams get stuck with AI-generated codebases that demo well but fail under real load — and what a rescue looks like.

    Fractional CTO4 min read

    “Vibe coding” is building software by describing what you want and accepting what comes back. With Lovable, Bolt, v0, Cursor, or Replit it works genuinely well, right up until it doesn't. The demo ships in a weekend. Production breaks in a month. That's usually when I get the call.

    Common symptoms

    • No tests, no types, no error handling, but excellent UI screenshots
    • Secrets committed to the repo because the generator put them there
    • A schema that made sense to the model and not to your queries
    • Auth that works in dev and has no real session handling in prod
    • Migration history where a third of the migrations exist to repair earlier ones
    • A codebase nobody on the team can explain, because nobody wrote it

    What a rescue looks like

    I don't throw the project away. I audit it in a fixed order: security first, then the data model, then the path that actually makes money. Usually most of the UI survives and most of the backend gets restructured underneath it, a piece at a time, while the app stays online.

    The goal is a codebase your team can still maintain next year, with or without AI in the loop. Whether I'd be proud of every line is beside the point.

    No judgment about the tools

    These tools got you to a working product faster than any agency would have, for a fraction of the money. Speed-to-demo is a real strategy. It happens to require a different skill than speed-to-production, and nobody tells you where that line sits until you've crossed it.

    Preventing the next one

    AI coding tools are accelerators, not architects. Someone still has to own the system design, the deploy pipeline, and the call on what gets merged. That's the fractional CTO job: owning those three decisions so the code that ships doesn't become an incident later.

    A rescue starts with a $1,500 audit. You get a written assessment of what's safe, what's load-bearing, and what needs to be replaced, plus an honest answer on whether it's worth fixing at all. Sometimes it isn't, and I'll tell you that in the audit rather than after the invoice.