Can You Feel the Vibe?

“Vibe coding,” if we have to name it, is the instinct to follow an idea straight into a running system before the bureaucracy wakes up. It’s intoxicating. It’s useful. And left alone, it’s shadow IT with better syntax highlighting.

So: keep the spark, lose the shrapnel.

The Instinct Is Fine. The Invisibility Isn’t.

People aren’t vibe coding because they hate process; they’re doing it because process is slow at the exact moment their brain is fast. You know this dance:

• The idea shows up fully formed (or close enough).

• You need a REPL, a repo, and a data source—now.

• Every extra form to fill is a chance the idea evaporates.

We can wag our fingers about “proper intake” or we can design a place for this energy to land safely. The behavior isn’t going away. Pretending it will just pushes it deeper underground.

Design a Sandbox, Not a Maze

Imagine a paved path that feels like a dirt trail. That’s the job.

I want a sandbox where anyone can mash ideas into code, hit “deploy,” get real feedback… and where we still capture an audit trail, enforce basic guardrails, and promote winners to the grown-up pipeline automatically. Freedom up front, governance in the substrate.

Call it Spark → Prove → Promote:

1. Spark (Fast & Loose, but Logged):

   • Spin up a temp repo/branch from a template (vibe-template), auto-tagged as experimental.

   • Ephemeral env with pre-approved IAM role, read-only test data, and a 24-hour TTL.

   • Everything auto-logs: who did what, when, and which data they touched.

2. Prove (Make It Real Enough):

   • Smoke tests or a tiny checklist: “Does it run? Is there a README? Any secrets in code?”

   • Observability baked in (stdout goes to a sandboxed log store; errors page you, not the on-call team).

   • A lightweight “promote” button that kicks off a review workflow.

3. Promote (Graduate or Archive):

   • If it’s useful, a pipeline migrates code to the main org, assigns owners, and wires alerting.

   • If it’s junk, auto-archive and clean up the infra. No guilt, no clutter.

A win is a win. A miss evaporates without leaving landmines.

Guardrails Without Killing the Vibe

Here are the rails I care about. Most are invisible at run time, very visible at audit time.

• Identity Everywhere: Every scratch environment is tied to an actual person and a ticketable artifact (even if the ticket is created behind the scenes). “Anonymous Lambda” is not a vibe.

• Data Diets: Only synthetic or scrubbed data in Spark. Production data is opt-in, logged, and red-flagged. Boring but mandatory.

• Ephemeral by Default: Time-to-live on resources. If no one renews, it self-destructs (with polite warnings).

• Policy-as-Code, Quietly: Template repos include OPA/Snyk/whatever scans that fail hard on secrets and license issues. People shouldn’t have to think about it; it just works.

• Observability from Line One: Drop a logger, get a dashboard. If your experiment crashes, you get the ping, not PagerDuty at 2 a.m.

• Clear Promotion Path: Don’t make success painful. One click (or simple PR label) should kick off “make this production-ready” automations: code owners, IaC modules, secrets rotation, etc.

Tiny Example: The “Vibe Template” Repo

# vibe-template/.github/workflows/ci.yml
name: vibe-ci
on: [push]
jobs:
  test-n-scan:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: pip install -r requirements.txt
      - run: pytest --maxfail=1
      - name: secret-scan
        uses: trufflesecurity/trufflehog-actions-scan@v3
      - name: opa-policy
        run: opa eval --fail-defined -i policy.rego -d src

Nobody asked for a pipeline. It’s just there—fast, opinionated, and loud only when something’s wrong.

Three Questions Before You Push “Run”

If you’re about to vibe code (or bless someone who is), ask:

1. Can this leak anything we’d be fired for leaking? No? Proceed.

2. Will anyone be paged if this melts? Yes? Rethink. Make the blast radius yours.

3. If it works, do we know the next step? Success without a path is just future pain.

If you can’t answer those in 30 seconds, your sandbox isn’t sand enough.

What This Looks Like for Real Orgs (i.e., Us)

• Platform Team: Builds and owns the vibe platform: templates, ephemeral envs, guardrails code. Think “internal Heroku for experiments.”

• Security/AppSec: Codifies “thou shalt not” as policies embedded in the template, reviews the promote stage, not every commit.

• Engineers/Analysts/Whoever Codes: Use it guilt-free. The rule: if you’re outside the sandbox, you’re in grown-up land and the rules apply.

• Leadership: Measures outcomes: # of experiments, # promoted, lead time from idea to prod, incidents caused by experiments (ideally zero). If the metrics go the wrong way, adjust guardrails—not the concept.

Why Bother?

Because the alternative is either (a) slow innovation or (b) silent innovation. Option (b) feels faster until the audit hits, or the clever Lambda starts costing $20k/month in egress fees.

We can have speed and safety. We just have to engineer it. (Shocking, I know.)

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TL;DR (Because I Know You Skipped)

• Vibe coding is happening. Engrave it in policy or pretend it isn’t—your choice.

• Build a paved sandbox: Spark → Prove → Promote.

• Guardrails = identity, data boundaries, ephemeral infra, policy-as-code, built-in observability, smooth promotion.

• Success path must be easier than stealth path. That’s the only lever that actually works.

Keep the spark. Lose the shrapnel.