You're Not Going to Vibe Code Your Own ERP
(And Why That's Fine)
Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” in February 2025. The idea: describe what you want in plain English, let the AI write the code, and don’t look too hard at how it works. Just ship it.
Fourteen months later, Karpathy himself has moved on. He now prefers “agentic engineering,” a phrase that quietly concedes what we all figured out: vibes are fun until something breaks in production.
But here’s the thing. Vibe coding, for all the warranted skepticism, is a genuine productivity breakthrough for finance teams. Not because it turns you into a software engineer. Because it doesn’t. It’s a breakthrough because it lets you build small, deterministic tools that do exactly what you tell them to, the same way, every time.
Why deterministic matters to us
Every time you ask an LLM to run a report, you get a slightly different output. Different phrasing. Different rounding choices. Occasionally, different numbers. That’s the probabilistic nature of these models, and for exploratory analysis, it’s fine. For a depreciation schedule your auditors need to tie out? Not fine.
Code doesn’t have that problem. A Python script that calculates straight-line depreciation will return the same answer on Tuesday that it returned on Monday. It’s verifiable. Replicable. Auditable. All the things finance people actually care about.
So yes. Build the little web app that reformats your GL export. Write the script that flags variances above your threshold. Automate the monthly accrual calc that three people keep doing slightly differently in Excel. These are excellent use cases for vibe coding.
Then the questions start
Where does that app run? On your laptop? A shared server? Somebody’s personal Replit account?
Who has access to the data flowing through it? Is it logging anything? Where do those logs live? Did anyone check whether it’s pulling from a sandbox or your production GL?
And then there’s the code itself. A December 2025 CodeRabbit analysis of 470 open-source GitHub pull requests found that AI co-authored code contained roughly 1.7x more major issues than human-written code. Security vulnerabilities ran 2.74x higher. Misconfigurations, 75% more common.
These aren’t theoretical risks. They’re the exact kind of control gaps that keep SOX compliance officers up at night.
Respect the domain
Full-stack engineers don’t just write code. They manage authentication protocols, role-based access controls, database architecture, CI/CD pipelines, dependency management, and about forty other things that never occur to you until something goes wrong. There’s a reason they went to school for this. It’s a deep, specialized domain.
Sound familiar? Because so is ours. ASC 606 revenue recognition. Lease accounting under ASC 842. FIFO vs. weighted average inventory. Intercompany eliminations. The fifty-seven ways a consolidation can go sideways.
Nobody wanders into our world with a chatbot and starts filing 10-Ks. We shouldn’t expect to wander into theirs and start deploying production software.
The real opportunity
This isn’t a discouraging story. It’s a calibration.
Vibe coding gives finance teams something they’ve never had before: the ability to prototype, test ideas, and build small tools without submitting a ticket to IT and waiting six weeks. That power is real, and it’s new, and you should use it.
But a vibe-coded app you don’t understand is just another black box. And we already have strong opinions about black boxes in finance.
The move is to learn enough about how software works to have an informed conversation with the people who build it. Read your code. Understand what your dependencies are. Know where your data lives. And when the tool outgrows a prototype, bring in an engineer.
The Pro edition this week goes deeper: a plain-language walkthrough of the software development stack, from version control to databases to deployment, written specifically for finance professionals who want to stop nodding politely in meetings with engineering. Plus a framework for deciding when a vibe-coded tool is good enough and when it needs to be handed off to a real dev team.
Unlock the full walkthrough & decision framework