After years of cleaning up messes for SaaS companies, I’ve realized something that nobody wants to admit: most teams aren't being agile, they're just "vibe coding." And it's a compliance disaster waiting to happen. "Vibe coding" is what I call it when developers build based on what feels right at the moment, ignoring specs, proper documentation, and formal processes in the name of moving fast. It’s the "we'll figure it out later" mentality disguised as innovation. I see it everywhere, especially in early stage startups that think they're too cool for rules. Last year, I was brought in to help a promising health tech company that had just failed its first major enterprise security review. The deal was worth millions. They failed because a junior developer, trying to solve a bug quickly, decided to log sensitive patient data (PHI) to an unsecured, third-party monitoring service because it "made debugging easier." It was a classic case of vibe coding. The dev had a problem, found a quick solution that felt right, and implemented it without a single thought for HIPAA. The fallout was catastrophic. Not only did they lose the deal, but they had to spend six figures on legal fees and a complete architectural overhaul to prove they'd fixed the issue. Their roadmap was frozen for six months. This isn't an isolated incident. I see it constantly: * GDPR: A team builds a user profile feature and starts pulling in data from every possible source without documenting the purpose. They're just "building a rich user experience." In reality, they're violating data minimization principles and setting themselves up for a huge fine. * SOC 2: A team pushes code to production whenever it "feels ready," with no formal change management logs. When the auditor asks for evidence of their process, they have nothing. The vibe was good, but the audit trail is nonexistent. The tech industry romanticizes the myth of the genius coder who just "gets it" and doesn't need to be bogged down by process. But when you're handling other people's data, their personal information, their financial records, their health data, your "vibe" doesn't matter. The law does. Compliance isn't a feature you bolt on later. It's not a boring checklist for the "business people" to worry about. It has to be baked into your culture and your architecture from the very first line of code. It means peer reviews aren't optional. It means you actually have to write down what you're building. It means the answer to "Why did you build it this way?" can't be "I don't know, it just felt right." The irony is that taking the time to build things correctly from a compliance perspective actually makes you faster in the long run. You spend less time refactoring, less time dealing with security incidents, and less time explaining to a multi million dollar customer why their data ended up in a place it never should have been.