In companies everywhere, employees are quietly solving problems with bots, scripts, GPT prompts, dashboards, and low-code automations.
They're not rebels. They're not rogue developers. They're vibing.
What Is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is informal, bottom-up development. It happens when people feel the pain, see the need, and quickly hack together a solution — often with tools at hand: Python, LLMs, Excel macros, low-code platforms.
Think of it as grassroots IT, built from empathy and immediacy. It skips the process — but not the value. And you will have to take a position on it, because it's already inside your enterprise.
Four Strategic Postures Toward Vibe Coding
Encourage It (Decentralised Business IT)
Seen at progressive enterprises, startup-minded organisations and companies with digital-native teams. These organisations empower their power users. They design light governance and invest in secure low-code platforms, bringing IT professionals into Fusion Teams where they coach from within instead of rule from without.
Discourage It (Classic Shadow IT View)
In highly regulated organisations, or those burdened by legacy IT, vibe coders are reined in or shut down. The fear is real: data loss, compliance gaps, version control. But it's a game of Whac-A-Mole — you can build and run apps from anywhere in the cloud, including one's phone. The trouble is that the organisations that most need innovation are sometimes the ones most likely to take this route.
Monitor It (Discovery Mode)
Seen at organisations in the middle of digital transformation. They know something is going on. They map citizen-development and aim to establish governance. But the speed and volume of vibe coding is too great. Cataloguing doesn't build experience, and what organisations most need in the digital era is to learn.
Ignore It (Missed Opportunity)
Seen at most organisations mid-2025. In the digital era, what you don't know is often already running in production — shaping decisions, exposing data, or delighting customers without your oversight.
Vibe Coding: A Secret Weapon for Customer Agility
I've been an IT Professional for 38 years. I've seen every shade of shadow IT from Chile to Japan. And yet I've never seen anything like this. Never has it been more true that your employees and customers aren't going to wait for the IT roadmap.
Vibe coding is how the business responds faster than IT can plan. It's where real pain — internal or customer-facing — gets a fast, working solution.
And yes, I believe you should backburner all of your major corporate enterprise projects to resource the fusion teams now — especially if the corporate project has been running for more than one year. It's time to get real-time in annually-driven organisations. The digital era demands it.