Synopsis: Pendo CTO Erik Troan explains how vibecoding will soon be more widely adopted by end users across the enterprise.
Erik Troan, CTO at Pendo, says vibecoding is the newest way non-developers and engineers alike are coaxing AIs to write software with little more than plain-English prompts. The upside is speed; the downside is code that scales poorly, invites attackers or simply collapses under real-world traffic.
Troan has already seen both reactions in the wild. Designers at his own company use vibe coding to whip up high-fidelity prototypes in an afternoon—far beyond what a Figma mock-up could convey—while internet thrill-seekers bragged about shipping AI-written production apps one day, then shut them down three days later when bugs and breaches piled up. “Both stories can be true,” he notes.
For CIOs, the lesson is familiar: forbidding the trend will only drive it to personal credit cards and shadow IT. Instead, Troan advises building a sanctioned runway. Provide cloud environments, single-sign-on, audit logs and security reviews, but let employees experiment. IT’s responsibility shifts from owning every line of code to offering the guardrails—databases, policy checks, 24/7 infrastructure—that keep rapid experiments from turning into costly incidents.
Professional developers won’t be left behind. History shows they flock to any abstraction that removes toil, whether it was C over assembly or Python over C++. Vibe coding is just the next layer. Troan expects collaboration tooling, version control and enterprise-grade platforms for this style of development to emerge quickly, turning today’s solo chat sessions into team sports. In that world, countless small, even disposable apps may bloom—each automating a task for a week or a quarter, then vanishing when its job is done. The real opportunity, he argues, is harnessing that creativity without letting governance—and budgets—spiral out of control.
