"The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see, the future is." — Yoda
For decades, IT departments have battled shadow IT: employees spinning up unauthorized cloud services, installing unapproved software, and creating their own technical solutions outside official channels. CIOs learned to fear the rogue Dropbox account, the unsanctioned SaaS subscription, the Excel macro that somehow became mission-critical.
But shadow IT looks quaint compared to what's emerging now: shadow-vibing, or what we might call shadow development.
Shadow IT was concerning because non-technical employees were making technology decisions without proper oversight. They might choose tools with poor security, create compliance nightmares, or build dependencies on unsupported systems.
Shadow-vibing is exponentially more dangerous. With AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude, employees with no software engineering experience are now writing production code. They're not just choosing which tools to use—they're creating the tools themselves.
The marketing manager who's "vibing" their way through building a customer dashboard. The operations lead who prompted an AI to create a data pipeline. The product manager who "just quickly built" an internal admin tool. They're shipping code with the confidence of a developer but none of the foundational knowledge.
When someone without security training writes code—even with AI assistance—they don't know what they don't know. They won't recognize:
The AI might write syntactically correct code, but it won't enforce security principles that experienced developers have internalized. A Dropbox account might leak some files; shadow-vibed code can expose entire databases.
Shadow-vibers don't understand:
They're optimizing for "it works on my machine right now" rather than "this system will be maintainable for the next five years."
Industries with regulatory requirements (healthcare, finance, government) have strict rules about:
Shadow-vibers don't know these requirements exist, let alone how to implement them. They're creating compliance violations with every prompt.
This might be the most insidious aspect: shadow-vibers feel like they understand what they've built because the AI explained it in natural language. But understanding a high-level explanation is vastly different from understanding the implications, edge cases, failure modes, and maintenance requirements.
When shadow IT fails, you call the vendor's support line. When shadow-vibed code fails, you have:
Shadow IT required finding and signing up for external services—friction that naturally limited spread. Shadow-vibing requires only a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and a problem to solve. The barrier to entry is conversational ability, not technical procurement.
The Star Wars parallel is apt. Just as the dark side clouded the Jedi's ability to see clearly, shadow-vibing clouds an organization's understanding of its own technical landscape. Engineering teams lose visibility into:
By the time these shadow-vibed systems are discovered, they're often too embedded in business processes to simply shut down. The organization is forced to either:
This isn't a problem that can be solved by banning AI coding tools—that ship has sailed, and the tools are genuinely valuable. Instead:
Create official channels for AI-assisted development. Make it safe for people to ask for help rather than building in secret.
Training on:
Provide environments where people can experiment with AI coding without affecting production systems or sensitive data.
Regular scans for unauthorized deployments, unusual data flows, and code that doesn't match your organization's patterns. Think of it as security scanning for shadow development.
Build partnerships between business units and engineering. Make it easier to get engineering help for small projects. If the barrier to official development is too high, shadow-vibing will continue.
The power of AI-assisted coding is genuine and transformative. It can democratize technical capability and accelerate innovation. But with that power comes responsibility—responsibility that shadow-vibers often don't know they're taking on.
Organizations that address this proactively, with guardrails and education rather than prohibition, will harness the benefits while managing the risks. Those that ignore it will find themselves with a technical landscape as clouded and mysterious as anything in the Star Wars universe.
The dark side of AI coding isn't the AI itself—it's the illusion that natural language conversation with an AI is sufficient preparation for building production systems.
Just as Yoda warned that the dark side clouds everything, shadow-vibing clouds an organization's technical reality. The only defense is bringing these activities into the light, establishing clear practices, and ensuring that even AI-assisted development follows security and engineering standards.
The Force is strong with AI coding tools. Whether it leads to the light or dark side depends on how organizations choose to wield it.
About the Author: Mark Dorsi is a CISO, cybersecurity advisor, and investor helping organizations navigate the security implications of emerging technologies. He believes that AI coding tools are transformative but require proper guardrails, education, and organizational awareness to prevent shadow development from becoming a security crisis.