Vibe coding is the current habit of letting a model like Cursor or Claude Code run the whole build off a feeling and a short prompt. Developers do it, and lately so do business owners who are tired of waiting on developers. Prototyping that way really is fast. The doubt starts when the same output walks into production without anyone reading it.
Fourteen years in the WordPress ecosystem has shown me plenty of silver bullets come and go, and this shift still feels different. Code ships with a lightness that is hard to defend. For a quick and dirty MVP that is fine. It stops being fine the moment someone assumes the output is robust and error free without reading the source.
The technical debt of vibe coding
The problem is not that the model writes bad code. It is that the model has no view of context or of what the codebase has to survive later. It can produce a PHP loop for your WooCommerce store that works perfectly on the first run and still miss the race condition that appears when two users hit that endpoint in the same second. Repeat that enough times and even a senior dev cannot debug the result, because it is a pile of disconnected logic fragments instead of a design.
Cursor and tools like it index your codebase through a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline. Retrieval is the easy part. Hallucinations show up when your local documentation is thin or your legacy code still follows outdated standards, and then you get a suggestion to use a Hook or Filter that was deprecated back in the WordPress 4.x days.
A classic “vibe coded” mistake
This snippet turns up constantly in projects where the developer vibed through the prompts. It reads fine, and it will still eat your server memory or leave the global post state broken.
<?php
/**
* The "Vibe Coded" Approach
* Looks fine, but breaks the global post object and lacks validation.
*/
function bbioon_bad_vibe_loop() {
$args = array('post_type' => 'product', 'posts_per_page' => -1);
$products = new WP_Query($args);
if ($products->have_posts()) {
while ($products->have_posts()) {
$products->the_post();
// Do something with the product
echo get_the_title();
}
// AI often forgets this, leading to broken sidebars/menus
// wp_reset_postdata();
}
}The refactor below caps the query instead of asking for 10,000 products at once, and it cleans up the global state when it finishes.
<?php
/**
* The Senior Dev Approach
* Uses Transients for caching and ensures state is reset.
*/
function bbioon_robust_refactor() {
$cache_key = 'bbioon_top_products_cache';
$output = get_transient($cache_key);
if (false === $output) {
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'product',
'posts_per_page' => 50, // Limit for performance
'no_found_rows' => true, // Speed up query
);
$products = new WP_Query($args);
$output = '';
if ($products->have_posts()) {
while ($products->have_posts()) {
$products->the_post();
$output .= '<div>' . esc_html(get_the_title()) . '</div>';
}
wp_reset_postdata();
}
set_transient($cache_key, $output, HOUR_IN_SECONDS);
}
return $output;
}Balancing speed and stability
If you want Cursor or Ollama for local models, treat the model as a junior intern rather than an architect. Read every line it hands you, particularly anything touching transients or anything that can race another request. I wrote more about this in why you should stop vibe coding your next project.
If vibe coding is eating your dev hours or leaving strange bugs on a live site, I can take it over. I have been working with WordPress since the 4.x days and I know where these models tend to hallucinate.
Final takeaway
Shipping fast is worth something, but not at the cost of the site holding together. Vibe coding is good for exploration. Anything that writes to your database or runs through checkout wants a human who knows the WP-CLI and API side of it. Otherwise the lightness you enjoyed during the build comes back later as debt somebody has to pay.
