What is vibe code cleanup?

Why clean up vibe code instead of starting again?

The screens an AI builder produces are usually worth keeping: they encode decisions the founder has already made about the product. What needs work is underneath, where nobody looked. Cleanup is how you keep the first and fix the second without starting again.

It borrows the idea behind refactoring, which Martin Fowler describes as a series of small, behaviour-preserving changes. Each step is small, so it is less likely to go wrong, and the system keeps working after each one. See refactoring for the general technique.

What does vibe code cleanup usually involve?

Cleanup runs in a fixed order: understand the code, close the security holes, protect what works with tests, then simplify and set up safe releases. Security comes before tidying because a leak hurts users today, while messy code only slows the team down.

1. An audit: what the code does, where data goes, what a stranger can reach.
2. Security first: access rules in the database, secrets off the client, inputs validated on the server.
3. Tests around what works, so the next change cannot quietly break it.
4. Structure: one way of doing each thing, instead of five generated variations.
5. Releases and monitoring: staging, rollbacks, alerts.

What security fixes come first when cleaning up a Lovable app?

In a Lovable app on Supabase, the first fixes are database access and keys. The browser reaches the database with a publishable key, which only gets what row-level security allows. So every exposed table needs security switched on and policies that match who should see what.

• Enable row-level security on every table in an exposed schema, as Supabase's documentation advises, and write a policy per operation.
• Remove any secret or service-role key from browser code. It bypasses every policy. If one has leaked, create a new key, replace it everywhere, confirm things work, then delete the old one.
• Put the access rules in a migration, so they are the same in every environment.
• Check server functions confirm who is calling before they act. OWASP's 2025 list ranks broken access control first.

What mistakes make vibe code cleanup harder?

The costly mistakes are tidying before testing, and trusting a green scan. Restructuring code with no tests around it means nobody can tell whether a flow broke. A quick automated scan helps, but Lovable says its quick scan does not review application code and its tools do not replace a thorough review.

• Rewriting large parts at once, instead of small steps that each leave the app working.
• Fixing the interface to hide data, while the database still returns it to anyone who asks.
• Keeping five generated versions of the same logic and patching only one.

If you want this done for you, vibe coding rescue is how we approach it, and the production readiness check shows where to start.