The CISO Vibe Coding Checklist for Security

Vibe coding has changed who can build software inside an organization. With AI-powered tools, employees outside of engineering can now create and ship applications in hours. For CISOs, this is no longer a future concern. It is already happening.

Many of the risks described below are playing out in real production environments. The CISO Vibe Coding Checklist draws on real-world experience and includes direct input and quotes from the CISOs of Lovable and Supabase, companies operating at the center of modern AI-driven development.

Tools like Lovable, Copilot, and Cursor remove friction from development. The upside is speed. The downside is that long-standing security assumptions no longer hold.

Why vibe coding changes the security model

Vibe-coded applications often bypass the controls security teams depend on. Non-engineers paste secrets into prompts, work directly in production, and rely on insecure defaults. Frontend code is treated as private when it is not. Authentication and access control are frequently misconfigured or skipped.

As Lovable CISO Igor Andriushchenko notes, anything that runs in the browser can be manipulated, stolen, or abused. That single reality breaks many of the shortcuts people take when building with AI.

This pattern will feel familiar to CISOs. Shadow IT, BYOD, and unsanctioned SaaS followed the same arc. Blocking them did not work. Clear guardrails did.

What CISOs need instead of bans

CISOs who are navigating vibe coding successfully focus on three areas.

First, technical guardrails. AI-generated code must be treated as untrusted by default. Access control, authentication, secrets management, staging environments, and CI/CD enforcement become non-negotiable.

Second, AI-specific controls. AI output needs review gates. Certain functions like authentication and cryptography should never be generated ad hoc. Prompts must be governed just like source code.

Third, organizational clarity. Every app needs an owner. Builders need paved roads instead of one-off solutions. Non-engineers need security guidance that fits how they actually build.

Supabase CISO Bill Harmer has been explicit about the importance of strong defaults, particularly around authentication and access control. Those lessons increasingly apply far beyond traditional engineering teams.

Introducing the CISO Vibe Coding Checklist

To help CISOs respond quickly and practically, we created the CISO Vibe Coding Checklist for Security.

It includes:

• A one-page executive checklist for fast reviews and prioritization
• A deeper checklist covering technical guardrails, AI-specific controls, and organizational moves
• Guidance grounded in real incidents and real operating environments

The goal is not to slow teams down. It is to make secure paths the easiest paths.

If vibe coding is already happening in your organization, this checklist helps you get ahead of it.

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