Thoughtworks Technology Podcast · Thoughtworks

We still need to talk about vibe coding: Reflections on 2025's word of the year

·46 min·4 clips

Lily says vibe-coded apps are already being hacked and breached in the wild.

The show revisits vibe coding in a follow-up to a conversation from about six months earlier. Prem hosts with Lily and Neil, and the group spends time on how the term has drifted as it spread. Their starting point is semantic diffusion: once enough people use a phrase, it stops meaning only one thing. They apply that idea to vibe coding, which now covers different practices, assumptions, and outcomes. The conversation keeps coming back to the distance between getting software to work and being able to maintain it. That gap matters because speed at the keyboard does not erase ownership costs. Lily pushes the talk toward security, pointing out that it can be left out unless someone asks for it directly. The hosts treat that as a real failure mode, not a philosophical one. Neil takes that warning into the wider software ecosystem. He expects attackers to look for the fingerprints of vibe-coded systems and use them. The episode ties that concern to a broader point about software environments changing quickly. What looks rough at first can turn into a familiar target once it becomes common. Maintainability comes up again and again. A tool can produce something that works, but if the team does not understand how it was made, nobody can carry it for long. That is the part the episode seems to land on most firmly. The hosts keep returning to trust but verify. They treat vibe coding as something that is probably here to stay, but only if people handle it with care. Adoption is possible. Context, security, and ongoing verification still do the hard part.

As heard by us

A sober follow-up on vibe coding that keeps circling maintenance, security, and what breaks later.

This episode looks back at vibe coding six months on, and the main point is that the term has stretched until it is doing too much work. The conversation keeps coming back to a plain question: who can keep this stuff running once the novelty fades?

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Why you'd press play

Six months later, the vibe-coding conversation has moved from meme to maintenance risk.

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