When vibe-coding is good enough and when you need a real developer

Vibe-coding is everywhere. With tools like Cursor, Lovable, and v0, someone with no engineering background can have a working webapp running in an afternoon. That's impressive. It's also risky if you don't know the limits.

At Livewall, we use these tools actively, including in production workflows. So we know from direct experience where they shine and where they quietly back you into a corner. The question isn't whether vibe-coding is useful. The question is: what are you building, for whom, and what are the consequences when something breaks?

Where vibe-coding actually earns its place

Making an idea visible fast. For rapid prototyping, vibe-coding is excellent. You have a concept, you want to point at it, let a stakeholder click through it. The output doesn't need to be scalable. It just needs to work in the room.

Internal tools with a small, tolerant user group. A simple dashboard for a team of ten, a form that pushes data to a spreadsheet, an internal view that nobody outside your company will ever see. When the consequences of a bug are low and your users are forgiving, vibe-coding fits fine.

Throwaway code as a thinking tool. Sometimes you're not building a product. You're testing an assumption. Vibe-coded prototypes are ideal for proving something works, or proving it doesn't. Throw them away afterwards and build something solid.

The Lefboom platform started with a tight definition of what needed to be proven. That's exactly the mindset that makes a vibe-coded starting point valuable.

Where you need a real developer

Authentication, payments, or personal data. The moment your product involves logging in, charging cards, or storing personal information, you need someone who understands what goes wrong when security fails. Vibe-coded output is rarely production-ready on this front.

Scale. A platform serving thousands of users, with a growing database and API integrations that need to stay reliable, requires architectural decisions that an AI tool won't make for you. With Dumpert and Sportvisunie, the requirements around scale and reliability were precisely why serious engineering decisions mattered from day one.

Products that need to last. Vibe-coded codebases are hard to maintain. If you want to add features in two years, you need a codebase a developer can reason about. That takes structure, documentation, and intentional technical choices.

Critical business processes. A tool driving a KLM campaign workflow across dozens of markets cannot crash on a Friday afternoon. For that, you don't need vibes. You need an engineer.