How to Spot a Vibe-Coded Project Before It Wastes Your Weekend

The loudest startup pitch today?
A repo built by someone who typed “Write a full app that does X” into a chat box, hit copy, and pushed to GitHub.

The quietest postmortem six months later?
That same repo, abandoned behind a single commit that never really ran.

Vibe coding is the art of letting a language model hallucinate an entire codebase — then pretending that hallucination is real software. It’s infecting startups, hackathons, and unsuspecting dev teams everywhere.

Here’s how to spot a vibe-coded monstrosity before you inherit it, contribute to it, or bet your Friday night on it.

1. Zero commits with meaningful diffs

Check the history. Vibe coders don’t refactor — they generate a blob and push.

If the log is just “initial commit” and “fix bugs” with no real incremental work, walk away.

Good code evolves. Vibe code appears fully formed — and breaks immediately.

2. Mysterious dependencies

Vibe code loves to glue together five libraries you’ve never heard of — often redundant or conflicting.

Bonus red flag: the README says

“If you get errors, try downgrading XYZ.”

Translation: the LLM bolted Stack Overflow snippets together and called it done.

3. Fragile README wizardry

If the README says “Run this exact command to start” but explains nothing about how the pieces fit, you’re looking at cargo cult scaffolding.

No real dev ships software they can’t describe in plain English.

4. No tests — or hilariously bad ones

Sometimes vibe-coded projects have tests. They’re usually nonsense:
“test that 2 + 2 equals 4” or boilerplate stubs that never touch real logic.

Zero meaningful assertions means maximum hallucination risk.

5. Overpromised scope, underdelivered reality

A real dev knows what’s hard. Vibe code promises the impossible:
A full Slack clone with AI moderation, infinite scale, real-time chat, serverless — all in 500 lines!

Open it: a half-baked Express server and a broken WebSocket.

6. Looks legit at first glance

This is the sinister bit. Vibe code is syntactically plausible — neat files, tidy comments, reasonable variable names.

Trace the flow: dead on arrival.
Type signatures lie. Edge cases unhandled. No logging, no config sanity, no error discipline. Just vibes.

How to defuse it

• Run it yourself. Never trust a README that claims “just works.”
• Check the commit history. Look for real iteration.
• Trace one critical flow. Does data actually get from input to output?
• Audit the dependencies. Are they sane and maintained?
• Check owner engagement. Is someone fixing issues, or ghosting them?

The hard truth

Vibe-coded projects are fast food for your GitHub stars. Easy to spin up, impossible to maintain, fun until you get food poisoning in production.

If you want software that lives longer than a weekend:
Kill the vibes. Keep the human.