There is a particular high that comes from describing an app in plain English and watching it appear on screen. A login page, a working database, a dashboard nobody hand-coded. The loop is fast, the feedback is instant, and the tedious parts of software suddenly feel optional. That feeling is real. It is also where most of the risk quietly gathers.
Vibe coding did not invent insecure software, it just changed the ratio. A beginner can now generate more code in one afternoon than they could carefully review in a week, and the output looks equally confident either way. Models write fluent, tidy, well-commented code that reads like it came from someone senior. Tidiness is not safety, and a model has no idea which endpoint will face real customer data next month.
The seven mistakes below turn up over and over in projects that went from prototype to public without anyone pausing. None of them need deep security expertise to avoid. They mostly need you to slow down at five specific moments.
Trusting Generated Code Because It Looks Finished
The first mistake is the parent of the other six. Generated code is a plausible answer, not a verified one, and plausibility is precisely what a language model optimizes for. It will happily hand you a search feature that concatenates user input straight into a SQL query, because thousands of tutorials did exactly that before it learned to write.
Read what you ship, even badly. You do not need to understand every line to catch the obvious shapes: string concatenation near a database call, a comparison that returns true when a field is missing, an admin route with no guard on it. The OWASP Top 10 for 2025 still lists broken access control at number one and injection at number five, which tells you how stubborn these categories are. Ask the model what an attacker would try first, which produces far better answers than most beginners expect.
Secrets That Ship Alongside the Code
Mistake two is the one that costs money fastest. API keys pasted into a frontend file, a .env committed because the model wrote it and you did not look, a database URL sitting in a config the browser can fetch. Bots scrape public repositories for exactly this, and a leaked key for a paid model API can run up a bill overnight.
Keys belong on a server you control, loaded from environment variables that never enter version control, and proxied so the browser only ever talks to your endpoint. Rotate anything that has already been exposed rather than hoping nobody noticed. It is also worth asking whether the sensitive data needs to leave the device at all, since some workloads run perfectly well locally, an argument made well in this look at privacy-preserving on-device recognition.
Authentication and Authorization Left for Later
Mistakes three and four travel together. Skipping authentication entirely, because the prototype only had one user and that user was you. Then adding a login screen but never checking, on the server, whether the logged-in person is allowed to touch the record they just requested. A hidden button is not a permission check. Anyone can open developer tools and call the endpoint directly.
Every route that returns or changes data needs two questions answered in the backend: who is this, and are they allowed. Ask the model to add that check explicitly per route rather than assuming it did, because it usually scaffolds the happy path and stops. Retool’s guide to secure vibe coding walks through the pattern in more detail, and the habit of separating identity from permission is worth building early.
Dependencies Nobody Actually Chose
Mistake five arrives quietly. Ask for a feature and you get a package, sometimes three, occasionally one that has not been maintained since 2019 or one whose name is a near-miss for something popular. You did not pick these libraries. You inherited them from a training set.
Look at what landed in your manifest before you deploy. Check the download counts, the last release date, and whether the name matches the project you think it is. Turn on automated alerts so the boring work happens without you, which takes about two minutes using Dependabot on any GitHub repository. Supply chain problems are not exotic anymore, and MITRE’s CWE Top 25 list is a good reminder that the same handful of weaknesses keep producing most real incidents.
Deploying Before Anyone Tested or Watched
The last two mistakes are about what happens after the code exists. Deploying without testing is the obvious one. Generated code compiles and demos beautifully, then falls over on an empty string, a duplicate email, or a file three times larger than anything you tried. Write a handful of tests for the paths that touch money, accounts, or uploads.
The seventh mistake is subtler and more common: shipping with nothing watching. No error logging, no rate limit, no alert when one IP address hits your signup endpoint four thousand times in an hour. You do not need a security operations center. You need enough visibility to notice, because the difference between a small incident and a bad one is usually how long it ran before anybody looked.
Closing Thoughts
None of this makes vibe coding a bad idea. It compresses the distance between an idea and a working thing, and that is genuinely new. The trouble starts when the speed of building sets the pace for everything else, including the decisions that deserve a slower one.
Pick one of the seven and fix it in your current project this week. Read the routes, move the keys, check the permissions, prune the packages, add a test, switch on logging. Each one takes an evening at most, and together they cover the ground where beginners actually get hurt.
