marmelab reposted this
Every CIO now gets the same call: “I vibe-coded an app over the weekend. Can you host it?” The request makes sense: the app works, and colleagues already use it every day. But it runs on a laptop (or on a personal Lovable account), its data sits in a database nobody backs up, and IT has no idea it exists. Putting it online for real requires a database, SSO, emails, logs, a security audit, and someone able to shut it down when its author leaves the company. Citizen developers aren’t new, but AI has turned every employee into one. And each of them builds several apps, so a team quickly runs dozens. Here’s the thing: this is good news for IT. An Excel file could circulate by email for years without IT ever hearing of it. A vibe-coded app can’t stay under the radar for long, because it needs real infrastructure. Give citizen developers a platform that’s easier than going around you, and they’ll come to you. That’s a rare chance to take back control of shadow IT. So where should these apps live? We compared two dozen “AI platforms” across four families: - SaaS app builders (Lovable, Bolt, Replit): fast, but they rarely accept apps built with other tools. - Vendor platforms (Microsoft, ServiceNow, Databricks): strong on IT control, but your data stays in their cloud. - Open-source backends (Supabase, PocketBase, Appwrite): self-hosted and cheap per app, but weak on governance. - Building your own. Most CIOs rule out the last option right away, assuming it means months of work. I wanted to check that assumption, so we built our own AI platform on top of Supabase. It took one developer two weeks with Claude Code. Citizen developers now deploy and share their apps just by asking their agent, IT sees every app (who owns it, what it costs, how to stop it), and a single VM hosts about 50 apps. The full comparison & the code of our own AI platform: https://lnkd.in/edEGePS8 How does your IT department handle vibe-coded apps today? #AI #VibeCoding #CitizenDeveloper #ShadowIT #CIO #ITGovernance