"Vibe Coding" Comes for the Enterprise: A Skeptic's Field Guide to Build Agent

The Zurich release shipped something that made half of LinkedIn cheer and the other half quietly panic: a Build Agent that lets you create applications by describing them. They're calling it vibe coding, and it's exactly what it sounds like. You talk, it builds.

I want to be fair to both reactions, because both are right.

The cheering is earned. I've watched a non-developer stand up a working app, forms, a table, a bit of logic, in the time it takes to write the requirements doc that would've kicked off a six-week build. That's not a parlor trick. For the long tail of "we just need a simple tool to track X," this is liberation. The backlog of small, never-prioritized requests that haunt every IT shop? A lot of it just got addressable by the people who actually feel the pain.

Now the panic, because you hired me to be honest.

When business users can generate production apps by vibe, you don't get fewer apps, you get thousands of them. Some are great. Many duplicate each other. A few quietly handle sensitive data with nobody reviewing the access model. This is the classic shadow-IT problem, except the barrier to creation just dropped to zero and the velocity went up a hundredfold. "Who owns this app, who reviews it, and what happens when it breaks at 2 a.m." are not questions vibe coding answers on its own.

To ServiceNow's credit, they clearly saw this coming, which is why Zurich didn't ship Build Agent alone. It shipped alongside governance machinery, including a Machine Identity Console for managing the non-human identities that all this automation creates. That pairing is the tell. They know that creation without governance is just faster chaos.

So here's my guidance. Embrace Build Agent for the long tail, the small, low-risk, single-team tools that were never going to get developer time anyway. Put guardrails between vibe coding and anything that touches regulated data, money, or customer records. And appoint someone, a real human, to own the sprawl before it owns you.

Vibe coding is going to be huge. The winners won't be the teams that adopt it fastest. They'll be the teams that adopt it with adult supervision.