India, Sept. 26 -- 'Vibe coding' earned its name honestly. A developer describes what they want in plain language, an AI agent writes it, and the result is judged by whether it feels right rather than by its production quality. For a prototype, this is a superpower. The difficulty is that it works well enough to escape the prototype. Engineering teams are finding that the habits that make a demo possible do not survive contact with production systems, compliance requirements or customer expectations.

Three years ago, AI in software largely meant autocomplete. Then it meant agents capable of owning a task from end to end: picking up a ticket, editing files and opening a pull request without supervision. Large engineering organisations are...