Over the past year, I’ve said it repeatedly — Vibe Coding is being used incorrectly. Several recent studies have found that corporate implementations of Vibe Coding, especially those lacking proper contextual grounding, have produced underwhelming results.
Frankly, this doesn’t surprise me. The reason is simple:
- Vibe Coding is being practiced wrong.
- The perception of Vibe Coding is wrong.
Let’s unpack both.
1. The Practice Problem Too many organizations are approaching Vibe Coding as a “do-it-for-me” magic button — press a key and watch the code appear. That’s not Vibe Coding. That’s wishful automation. Vibe Coding, at its core, is nothing without context. It’s no different than onboarding a new developer: if you don’t give them the right documentation, project history, architecture decisions, and dependencies, they will flounder. The same applies to AI-assisted development. If you don’t invest the effort to feed your system structured knowledge — what the codebase does, how modules interact, and what the goals are — the results will be shallow, inconsistent, and ultimately unusable.
2. The Perception Problem The industry perception is that Vibe Coding can replace developers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Vibe Coding excels at generating prototypes, demos, and isolated proofs of concept. But enterprises don’t build from scratch anymore — they evolve complex, decades-old ecosystems. They extend legacy systems, integrate across APIs, maintain compliance, and deliver continuous improvement. Those are not greenfield problems — they are contextual problems. And that’s exactly where most corporate Vibe Coding initiatives fail. They treat the AI as a solo act rather than a collaborator.
The Shift to Context-Driven Development If you truly want Vibe Coding to work in an enterprise setting, stop thinking of it as “AI that writes code.” Start thinking of it as Context-Driven Development.
You must train your AI as if it were a new team member:
- Give it access to your architecture, not just your repo.
- Explain business intent, not just technical syntax.
- Provide detailed prompts with precise scope, location of resources, and expected outcomes.
Treat your AI as a partner, not a replacement. When you do that — when you enable it with the right context — you’ll start to see extraordinary returns.
At the end of the day, Vibe Coding isn’t magic. It’s just a mirror that reflects the quality of the context you give it.