Vibe Coding Cleanup Industry is Already Here

Oooops!

There’s a new job title on LinkedIn ‘Vibe Code Cleanup Specialist’. People are building their careers around fixing and improving AI-generated code. One consultant claims to manage 15–20 cleanup projects at a time. There is a dedicated marketplace called VibeCodeFixers.com.

Look familiar?

When I was in web development, every few years a new tool would arrive that promised to let anyone build a website. No experience needed. The results were predictable. Businesses would pay someone with a laptop and a template to throw up a site. It would look passable. Then things would go wrong. Pages would break. The site couldn’t be updated. Nobody could explain how it worked.

The worst-case scenarios were the disappearing builders. Someone would set up a website and vanish. If you had not kept control of your domain name, you’d lose your online identity as well as your money. I was called in more than once to try to pick up the pieces.

The tools changed but the pattern never did. Cheap production attracts untrained producers. Untrained producers deliver poor quality work. Someone else gets paid to fix it.

Now the same cycle is starting again. Only this time the tools are AI, and the stakes are much higher.

The worrying statistics

About a quarter of new startups now use AI to generate 95% of their code. Ninety percent of professional developers have adopted AI coding tools. The volume of AI-generated software is enormous and growing fast.

The quality is a serious concern. Veracode tested over 100 AI models and found that 45% of the code they produce contains security vulnerabilities. AI-generated code has nearly three times more security flaws than code written by humans.

One security researcher described the core risk as “the illusion of correctness.” The code looks professional. It looks production ready. It quietly introduces holes that attackers can walk through. This isn’t about obscure technical flaws that only specialists care about. These are the kind of security holes that leak customer data, expose payment details, and let strangers into systems they shouldn’t be anywhere near.

The flood is coming

When a cowboy builder puts up a bad website, the worst that happens is embarrassment and lost business. When someone ships insecure software, real people get hurt. Data gets stolen. Businesses get fined. Trust is destroyed.

The old pattern of cheap tools, untrained users, poor results return. At least then the consequences were limited. A bad website was a bad website. But a bad application handling customer data is a liability. A bad application handling payments is a disaster.

The vibe code cleanup industry is already booming. That tells you where we are. The remedial builders have arrived before the first wave of damage has even peaked.

Meanwhile, on the Jagged Frontier

I caught myself making this mistake. I’m a trained software engineer with decades of experience and I still got seduced by the speed of AI-generated code. I ended up with a dog’s dinner of an application because I skipped the design. It’s all too seductive.

The world is about to be hit with a wave of badly designed, insecure software. Some of it will be built by enthusiastic amateurs who genuinely don’t know what they don’t know. Some will be built by people who should know better but got carried away by the hype.

The cleanup specialists will do well. The rest of us will be dealing with the consequences for years.

Have you been called in to fix a vibe coding disaster? Or are you sitting on one right now? I’d be interested to hear what you’re seeing on the ground.