The Working Application Fallacy: What Four and a Half Months of Silence Hid in a Vibe-Coded Codebase
A live small-business website ran for four and a half months on unreviewed, AI-generated code with a clean console, a working demo, and a contact form that had never delivered a single lead. This case study measures the gap between "it works" and "it's sound": two-thirds of the source doing nothing, user-facing defects invisible to manual testing, and the numbers on what the cleanup fixed, what it cost, and where it made things worse.
- Author
- Matt Bowers
- Published
- 8 Aug 2026
- File
- PDF · 21.4 KB