Vibe Coding Will Lead To Spaghetti

Vibe coding is the new trend where non-tech people use AI to generate code without understanding how it works. Just tell the AI what you want, and boom, you got your app or website. Sounds amazing right? But here’s the problem, this approach often leads to what developers call “spaghetti code” and creates serious issues down the road.

Spaghetti code is exactly what it sounds like — a tangled mess where everything is connected in weird, complicated ways. The code works somehow, but nobody really understands why or how. When something breaks, you’re stuck with no idea which part needs fixing or how the different pieces connect together.

The other big issue is that AI-generated code isn’t properly tested. It might run fine for small projects today, but what about when you need to scale up? Or add new features? It’s like driving a car without knowing how the engine works.

I’m not saying vibe coding is all bad though. For quick MVPs to test if your idea has legs, it can be super useful. You can throw something together fast and see if it it has interest before investing too much time and money. The problem comes when non-tech people think they can build their entire business on AI-generated code without understanding what’s happening under the hood.

Take online shops for example. You could use tools like Cursor or Replit to vibe code an entire e-commerce site from scratch. These tools let you describe what you want in normal English and their AI generates the code. But when your site needs to handle hundreds of orders on Black Friday, or process sensitive payment data securely, that’s when the weaknesses show up.

The AI doesn’t think about future scalability. It just solves the immediate problem. So you end up with this patchwork of solutions that don’t work well together. And since you don’t understand the code, you can’t fix it yourself when things go wrong.

For building an online shop, I’d recommend using Shopify instead. It’s not perfect, but it’s been battle-tested by millions of merchants handling billions in sales. When you build on Shopify, you know it’s going to work reliably because thousands of developers have already fixed the bugs and optimized the performance.

Yeah, Shopify has limitations. You can’t always customize things exactly how you want. Like if you want a super unique coupon system that does something wild, you might be out of luck. But for a startup shop, it is worth it. You get reliability and can focus on your products instead of waking up to emergency calls about your site being down.

PagePalooza is a web app SaaS builder that bridges the gap between limited no-code tools and complex custom development. I created PagePalooza after repeatedly seeing business owners struggle with restrictive no-code platforms and watching them pay hundreds of dollars per month on something limited and they don’t own. I have built web apps for a long time now and I have all these tested prebuilt modules that I can quickly build into a custom web app in record times with AI assistance.

PagePalooza offers professional software engineers that build custom features with a transparent one-time fee per task instead of increasing monthly subscriptions. All code is expertly developed to be maintainable and scalable and you own it all. You could probably pay a year worth of subscriptions on a custom developed MVP on PagePalooza.

Vibe coding can be great for testing ideas fast, but it’s not a replacement for solid development when you’re building something serious. The architecture just isn’t designed to scale, and without understanding your own code, you’re setting yourself up for painful problems down the road.