Why Lawyers Won’t Vibe Code Enterprise Software
If you've been on LinkedIn lately — or frankly, if you have talked to anyone in tech — you've probably noticed the "vibe coding revolution". Lawyers are sharing screenshots and videos of AI-generated apps, showing off custom tools they "built" in an afternoon. And you might have even heard the argument, "Why pay for enterprise software when you can just describe what you want and get a working app for free?"
At the risk of sounding self-serving: vibe coding might be just another wave of hype.
The Backyard Farm Analogy
"Software is about to be free."
Let us examine why that is not true through the lens of an analogy — the backyard farm.
In principle, a backyard farm can give you all the food you need for free. You absolutely can grow potatoes in your backyard. You can raise chickens for eggs. You can plant and harvest beans. You can even have an orange tree. Theoretically, nobody needs to go to the supermarket again.
But... thousands of years of agricultural industrialization have taught us that's a flawed notion.
Yes, you can do it. Many do! But it is unlikely going to be cheaper or better than going to the supermarket. As consumers of food, most of us are better off holding down our actual paying jobs, earning sufficient money, and buying food from professionals who operate long supply chains that specialize in producing food at scale.
Proper division of labor has been proven to be advantageous time and again. The same logic applies to legal software.
What "Free" Software Costs
Let's assume vibe coded software is generally free to create. Many of the conversations around disposable software assert all costs related to software creation is free or nearly free, but these conversations miss the point that software costs extend to continued maintenance.
While LLMs may be pushing the cost of creating a working prototype to $0, there are still costs for:
Ongoing maintenance when things break
Security vulnerabilities (which AI-generated code introduces at alarming rates)
Updates when underlying APIs change
Design refinements based on actual usage and evolving needs
Compliance with data protection requirements
The lawyers who are vibe coding these tools are likely not going to be maintaining them. They have actual legal work to do. And even if they wanted to maintain their creations, is their time better spent debugging code or practising law?
Human talent and hours continue to be the constraints.
The Spectrum of Unreliability
The problem with vibe coded software is not that they crash.
Software that crash are annoying and inconvenient, but safe. You know immediately that something has gone wrong. You click try again, or you give up and do the work manually.
The real risk is software that runs perfectly but produces subtly wrong results. Code that executes without errors, but skips a validation step. Logic that handles 95% of cases correctly, but silently fails on edge cases. A tool that generates plausible outputs that are subtly, undetectably incorrect.
This is one of the big risks of vibe coded software. An LLM can produce code that runs, but it may not understand your business logic, skip conditions, miss valiadations, or mishandle exceptions. The software appears to work and the outputs look reasonable, but the vibed logic may miss something important and critical.
For legal work, this is catastrophic.
Why Silent Failures Are the Worst
For law firms, software is not simply about functionality. Law firms need their software to be reliable.
When a law firm adopts enterprise software, they're buying peace of mind. They are buying something they don't have to constantly second guess.
Software needs to aid lawyers achieve their goal. Lawyers serve clients. Lawyers sell trust. Trust is hindered by tools that are "probably fine" or "work most of the time".
Working fine nine times out of ten is not a 90% success rate. It's malpractice risk. And if you can't detect which of the ten outputs was wrong, you can't use any of them without verification. At what point does the software stop being useful?
Agents Amplify the Risk
The emerging wave of agentic AI makes this problem exponentially worse.
Traditional software sits there until you use it. You control when it runs, what inputs it receives, and you review the outputs before acting on them. If something seems off, you catch it.
Agents take autonomous action on your behalf. They analyze information, make decisions, and execute tasks without waiting for your approval. For example, an AI agent might do more than just flag a deadline — it can directly responds to it.
Now, imagine if we combine autonomous action with unreliability.
An unreliable tool you control is manageable. You can review outputs, catch errors, decide when to trust it. An unreliable agent acting autonomously might cause damage that is not discovered until much later.
For agents to be valuable in legal settings, they need to cross two thresholds:
the software itself must be reliable, and
the outputs must be trustworthy.
Reliability Needs Humans Too
Once someone vibes out a tool and starts selling it to lawyers, what happens when a lawyer asks:
"Is this secure?"
"What happens if there's a bug?"
"Who do I call when this breaks?"
Every enterprise contract we have ever seen and signed includes:
Security certifications
Uptime SLAs
Support SLAs
Most of all, there is an unspoken understanding that the features which worked during testing and pilot continue to work in exactly the same way — predictability, consistency, and stability.
The opportunity cost of diverting your best people from core legal services to servicing software can become the most expensive part of maintaining software.
Where Vibe Coding Works
We are not saying vibe coding has no place.
Vibe coding is brilliant for prototyping.
Vibe coding is brilliant for one-off tools with a user base of one.
Vibe coding may even work for small firms or teams who need specific functionality and can tolerate instability — or more accurately, can afford the time to manually verify every output.
When reliability matters less, or when the alternative is nothing at all, vibe coding is transformative. As a result, we might see a renaissance for smaller law firms who can now access functionalities that were previously only available to large enterprises.
However, CIOs of law firms and companies will continue to demand enterprise software, because they want and are willing to pay for peace of mind.
Not software that probably works. Software that demonstrably, verifiably works.
Not vibed patches and updates. Service that accompanies the product.
The Trust Equation
The vibe coding hype misses something fundamental about legal: you can't skip reliability to get to automation faster.
Yes, vibe coding is real.
Yes, the cost of software generation has collapsed.
Yes, the world is changing.
But lawyers fundamentally still need tools they can trust — not just tools that run every time 60% of the time, but tools that are correct. Software that doesn't just execute, but that executes reliably, consistently, and verifiably.
That's what legal firms demand. Not the fastest features, not the most “AI-native” interface, not the most iterations. Reliability you can verify. Outputs you can trust. Software that works the same way tomorrow as it did today.
That is, of course, until someone manages to vibe code trust.
