How to hire a vibe coder without getting burned

Recruiters can't vet vibe coders. They don't know what to look for. They search for “React” and “5 years experience” and miss the only thing that matters

Did this person ship something last week

1. Throw out the resume

A resume tells you what someone wants you to believe. A GitHub profile tells you what they actually did. A live URL tells you whether it worked. Start at the end of that chain and work backwards

2. Ask for the receipts

Three questions

• What did you ship last week? Show me the URL
• What AI tools do you use and why those? If they say “all of them” they use none of them
• Walk me through a feature you built in under a day. Where did the AI mess up. How did you catch it

The third question is the killer. A real vibe coder has war stories. A pretender has marketing copy

3. Give them a real task

Two hours. Real problem from your backlog. Watch them work — not the theatrical kind of watching. Hand over the brief, leave them alone, check the deployed URL when the timer ends

If there's no URL, there's no hire

4. Skip the recruiter

Engineering roles take a median of 41 days to fill, and the slowest 10% stretch past 80. Tech recruiters charge 15–30% of first-year salary. On a $200K seat that's $30K–$60K. For that money you could pay a senior vibe coder for two months and have a working product

Do that instead

Red flags

• Can't name the last bug they fixed
• Talks about prompts, not architecture
• No public repo, no live URL, no shipped projects
• Calls themselves a “prompt engineer”
• Quotes you a three month timeline for an MVP

Green flags

• Has a list of URLs and ships another one this week
• Can explain a tradeoff in their own code without checking notes
• Knows where the AI breaks and routes around it
• Quotes you in days, not weeks