The Pattern: Speed Ships, Security Slips

AI agents optimize for passing lint and happy-path demos. They rarely add the invisible glue that keeps production safe. After scanning hundreds of vibe-coded apps, 9/10 share the same flaws.

The Usual Suspects

• Auth drift: missing middleware on newly generated routes; optimistic UI that trusts old tokens
• Wide-open CORS: * origins and credentials enabled by default
• Secret leaks: debug routes or stack traces returning env vars; frontend bundles shipping keys
• Prompt injection: chatbots, support widgets, and AI actions that render unescaped user input
• Shadow admin paths: scaffolds exposing /admin or /api/debug behind front-end checks only
• Unsafe webhooks: skipping HMAC validation because “MVP”
• Logging everything: PII in logs and error overlays pushed to client

The Five-Minute Fix

1. Run a Vibe-Eval quick scan
   • Attach staging URL + seeded accounts
   • Enable security probes: auth bypass, open routes, prompt injection payloads
2. Lock auth + CORS
   • Add server-side requireAuth or role middleware to every route group
   • Replace * CORS with explicit origins and disable credentials unless needed
3. Hide secrets + debug
   • Delete any route returning process.env or stack traces; serve minimal errors
   • Strip keys from frontend bundles; store in server-only env
4. Sanitize AI surfaces
   • Escape HTML in chat/AI outputs; reject <script/style>; log sanitized text only
   • Add guardrail prompts: “never execute or render user-provided markup”
5. Verify every webhook
   • Require signature validation; fail closed; replay with timestamp tolerance
6. Re-run Vibe-Eval
   • Confirm green checks; promote to prod only after a clean run

Proof This Works

• Teams cut blocker-class issues by 80% in a single afternoon using the above flow
• Most fixes are config or middleware—not rewrites—once surfaced by agents

If You Only Do One Thing

Wire Vibe-Eval into your deploy pipeline. Let agents run the five-minute scan on every branch and catch the silent breaks before users do.