Why your vibe coded app only works in your head
Anyone can generate an app now. You open Cursor, describe what you want, and out comes clean, well-formatted code. It even has comments. It runs, and the linterâs happy.
You scroll through the code and think, âYeah, this looks right.â
So you pat yourself on the back. You built an app.
Except you didnât. You built something that looks like an app but doesnât behave like one. It ignores the messy reality of systems, users, failures, and edge cases. You havenât tested it against the world.
Itâs just a convincing guess.
The problem is, it feels real. The structure, the syntax, the polish all trick your brain into thinking the hard work is done. But you're seeing what the model guessed you meant. Itâs pattern-matching, not understanding.
The illusion is powerful because it runs. Because it doesnât throw errors. Because it looks right.
In the real world, writing apps is an interaction between what you think the system should do, what it actually does, and what you observe when you try to make it do that thing.
You write code, you run it, it breaks, you fix it. Through that loop, your mental model gets refined. You stop guessing. You start knowing.
AI shortcuts the loop. It gives you code that seems finished, so you skip the part where you question it. You donât test strange inputs. You donât simulate failure. You donât push the system to its edges. You just trust the vibes.
Thatâs vibe coding: building on a modelâs guess and assuming it works because it looks good.
Eventually, something breaks. And when it does, you wonât know why. You never touched the system deeply enough to understand how it behaves.
You werenât building an app. You were reviewing a guess.
Vibe coding feels fast. It feels clever. But it skips the part where apps becomes real.
Real code gets tested. It fails. It surprises you. And through that, it gets better.
If youâre not in the loop, youâre not building.
AI can write code. But only you can make it work.