Something remarkable is happening inside companies right now, and most org charts have not caught up to it yet.
A COO sits down with Claude after lunch. By 4 PM, she is demoing a working vendor portal to her leadership team. No budget request. No vendor evaluation. No three month project plan. Just a few hours of conversation with an AI and a working application on the screen.
That is vibe coding. And it is creating a brand new role that I believe every organization will need within the next year. I call it the vibe code finisher.
First, What Exactly Is Vibe Coding?
The term was coined in early 2025 by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who described a style of building software where you “fully give in to the vibes” and let the AI write the code while you describe what you want in plain English.
In practice, vibe coding means non-technical people building real, functional software by prompting AI tools. No computer science degree. No syntax. No Stack Overflow rabbit holes. You describe the outcome, the AI writes the code, you react to what you see, and you keep iterating until it does what you want.
And it works. Here are the kinds of things I am seeing built every week:
- A COO builds an internal app that pulls order data from three systems into one dashboard, replacing a weekly spreadsheet ritual that ate four hours of someone’s Monday.
- An HR director builds an onboarding tracker that emails new hires their checklist automatically, something the company had been quoted five figures to license.
- A warehouse manager builds a barcode lookup tool on a Tuesday morning because the official request had been sitting in the IT queue since March.
- A marketing lead wires up a form that scores inbound leads and drops them into the CRM, no integration consultant required.
The old path for any one of these was brutal: 20 meetings, a requirements document nobody read, three months of back and forth with IT or an outside dev shop, or a software license with features you would never use. The new path is one motivated person, one AI assistant, and an afternoon.
This is genuinely exciting. I have been building software since 1988, and I have never seen the distance between “I have an idea” and “look at this working demo” collapse this fast.
Now, the Problem Nobody Mentions in the Demo
Here is the part that does not make it into the all-hands presentation.
That vendor portal the COO demoed? It is a fantastic prototype. It is also, almost certainly, not ready to roll out. Not because the COO did anything wrong, but because production readiness is invisible. A demo and a production application can look identical on screen while being worlds apart underneath.
What is usually missing:
Security. Is there real authentication, or does anyone with the URL get in? Is user input sanitized, or is the app one crafted form field away from a SQL injection? The OWASP Top Ten exists for a reason, and AI generated prototypes routinely trip over half of it.
Performance and scalability. The app worked beautifully with 12 test records. What happens with 50,000 rows and 40 simultaneous users? Demos never find out. Production always does.
Infrastructure. Where does this actually live? Right now it is running on the COO’s laptop. It needs a real server, SSL, a domain, and monitoring.
Backups and recovery. Six months from now this app holds data the company depends on. Who is backing it up? Has anyone ever tested a restore?
Error handling and maintenance. Prototypes handle the happy path. Production code handles the API timeout, the malformed upload, the user who pastes an entire email into the phone number field.
Could the COO have prompted the AI for all of this? Technically, yes. The AI is perfectly capable of writing secure, scalable code. But you have to know to ask, and you have to know whether the answer is right. That knowledge is exactly what separates a developer from a vibe coder. The AI amplifies what you know. It does not replace knowing it.
Enter the Vibe Code Finisher
Picture a relay race. The vibe coder runs a blistering first leg. They had the vision, they proved the concept, and they got the whole company excited. But they are not the one who crosses the finish line. They hand off the baton.
The vibe code finisher takes that handoff. Their job:
- Audit the prototype. Review the AI generated code for security holes, fragile logic, and shortcuts.
- Harden it. Real authentication, input validation, encrypted credentials, proper session handling.
- Make it scale. Indexed databases, sane queries, caching where it matters.
- Deploy it properly. A real server, SSL, monitoring, and logging instead of a laptop under someone’s desk.
- Protect it. Automated backups, a tested restore process, a plan for when things break.
- Document and hand it back. So the next person, possibly the original vibe coder, can keep improving it safely.
The finisher does not start over and does not lecture anyone about how it should have been built. They take a working prototype, respect the vision behind it, and carry it the last mile. The vibe coder gets their idea in production. The company gets software it can trust. Everybody wins.
If You Work in IT, This Is the Best News You Have Heard All Year
I want to speak directly to internal IT folks and developers for a moment, because I know how this can feel from your side of the desk. The executives are building apps now? Without us?
Resist the urge to see this as a threat. It is the opposite.
For decades, IT departments have been buried under request queues, treated as cost centers, and pulled into projects only when something breaks. Vibe coding flips that. Suddenly the people running the company are personally invested in software projects. They built the demo themselves. They are excited. And they need a partner to make it real.
That partner gets a level of visibility that no help desk ticket ever produced. When you take the COO’s prototype and ship it as a secure, fast, reliable production app, you are not the person who said no. You are the person who made the COO’s idea actually work. Do that three or four times and watch what happens to your standing in the organization.
The volume of these projects is only going to grow. Every vibe coded prototype is a future handoff, and every handoff needs a finisher. The internal developer who embraces this role early does not become less valuable in the age of AI. They become the most valuable technical person in the building.
This will not take away your job. It will give you a bigger one.
How to Get Started
If you lead a company: Look internally first. You probably already employ your vibe code finisher. They are the developer who fixes things before anyone notices, or the IT person who quietly automated half their own job. Name the role, even informally, and create a lightweight handoff process: every AI built prototype gets a finisher review before it touches real data or real users.
If you are that internal person: Raise your hand. Offer to review the next AI built demo that makes the rounds. Build a simple checklist covering security, performance, hosting, and backups, and become the person prototypes go to on their way to production.
If you have no internal candidate: This is a perfect engagement for an outside consultant, because the scope is beautifully contained. The prototype already defines the requirements. A finisher does not need 20 discovery meetings. The demo is the spec.
My Take
Vibe coding is not a fad, and it is not a threat to software professionals. It is the biggest expansion of who gets to build software since the spreadsheet. But prototypes are not products, and the gap between them is where companies will either thrive or get burned.
The organizations that win will be the ones that pair the creative energy of vibe coders with the discipline of finishers. If you are trying to figure out how this looks inside your company, or you have a stack of AI built prototypes and no finisher in sight, that is exactly the kind of problem I love doing. Reach out. And if you enjoyed this post, there is more like it here on MichaelGinsberg.me (or soon there will be).
FAQ
What is vibe coding? Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI tool like Claude in plain English and letting the AI write the code. The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. It lets non-programmers create working applications in hours instead of months.
What is a vibe code finisher? A vibe code finisher is a technical professional who takes an AI built prototype and makes it production ready by adding security, performance optimization, proper hosting, backups, error handling, and documentation. Think of a relay race: the vibe coder runs the first leg, the finisher carries the baton across the line.
Is vibe coding safe for business use? Prototypes built through vibe coding are great for proving an idea, but they typically lack authentication, input validation, scalability, and backups. They should go through a finisher review before handling real company data or real users.
Will vibe coding replace developers? No. It changes what developers do. As more non-technical employees build prototypes, demand grows for skilled people who can audit, harden, deploy, and maintain those applications. Finishing skills become more valuable, not less.
Should the vibe code finisher be internal or external? Either works. Internal IT staff and developers are ideal because they know the company’s systems and gain huge visibility from the role. Companies without internal candidates can hire a consultant, and the scope is naturally well defined because the prototype itself acts as the spec.
How long does it take to finish a vibe coded prototype? It depends on complexity, but far less than building from scratch. The requirements are already proven and visible in the working demo. Many internal tools can go from prototype to hardened production deployment in days or a couple of weeks rather than months.