security checklist for vibe-coders

hey friend, Miron here, it’s issue number 10 already (wow)

What started ten weeks ago now lands in 3 k+ inboxes every Friday, and 18 of you have already claimed a seat in the private Vibe Code Lab community that opens early August. (Details down below—hit reply if you want your name on the door and special offer before the list goes public.)

Today’s theme is speed × safety.

Vibe-coding with Cursor or Lovable is pure adrenaline: prompt, refactor, ship, repeat. But the faster we sprint, the easier it is to leave the security gates wide open. RLS off, no rate-limit, secrets in the frontend… ask me how I know.

My own stack is Supabase + Vercel; both give you a ton of protection if you bother to flip the switches. So I pulled together a Security Checklist for Vibe-Coders—nine quick moves that keep bad actors from nuking your fresh MVP. If you love it (or spot gaps), tell me; I’m sketching a full “Secure-by-Prompt” mini-guide once the Design and AI SEO playbooks ship.

Let’s dive in.

Security Checklist for Vibe-Coders

(Ship fast, don’t get pwned)

Cursor or Lovable will happily turn a weekend prompt-fest into a “working” MVP—but the first bot net that hits your open endpoint can melt the thing. Run through these nine checks before you slap Launch on Product Hunt:

1. Rate-limit every endpoint

   Supabase Edge Functions, Vercel middleware, or a dead-simple IP throttle in Next.js. One rogue script shouldn’t be able to hammer you 100 ×/sec.

2. Row-Level Security (RLS)

   If you’re on Supabase, flip RLS on every table. Add a user_id = auth.uid() policy and sleep better. No RLS = strangers reading each other’s data.

3. Captcha the auth flows

   hCaptcha or reCAPTCHA on sign-up, login, and “forgot password.” AI bots can fake a thousand sign-ups before your espresso cools.

4. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

   Vercel ➜ Settings ➜ Security ➜ Web Application Firewall ➜ Attack Challenge ON. One click, huge win.

5. Lock your secrets

   .env files, server-only functions, and a quick Cursor: check my code for hard-coded keys prompt. If it runs in the client, assume it’s public.

6. Validate everything server-side

   Email, password, uploaded files, API payloads. UI validation ≠ real validation.

7. Audit your dependencies

   npm audit fix, prune unused packages, kill anything that hasn’t been patched since 2022. Less surface area, fewer nightmares.

8. Add basic monitoring & logs

   Supabase Logs, Vercel Analytics, or bare-bones server logs with timestamps + IP. You can’t fix what you can’t see.

9. AI code review pass

   Prompt GPT-4o: “Act as a security engineer, find auth, injection, or rate-limit issues in this repo.” It won’t catch every edge-case, but it will flag the obvious holes.

TL;DR
Rate-limit → RLS → CAPTCHA → WAF → Secrets → Validation → Dependency cleanup → Monitoring → AI review. Miss one, and you’re inviting trouble.

My personal guides — two out, two cooking

Out now:

• Zero → Launched: The AI-Powered Solo Builder Guide (23 pages, 69 sales) – a complete solo-builder playbook that covers prompt flows, stack setup, and launch-ready systems.

• AI Debugging & Refactor Playbook (7 pages, 21 sales) – the ritual I use to spot hallucinations, test with confidence, and keep tech debt tame in AI-assisted repos.

Both are still cheaper than a Milanese croissant until the community opens—after that the price heads north. Buy them now or grab the bundle when the Circle drops.

Coming next:

• Vibe Design Guide – AI-first UI that doesn’t scream “template”.

• AI SEO Playbook – a deeper dive into the LLM-traffic framework from last week’s issue.

• Maybe create another one on security for vibe-coders?)

Seen this week

• Anthropic drops a free prompt-engineering master-class – nine bite-sized chapters that walk from “basic prompt shape” to “avoiding hallucinations.” Worth bookmarking if you speak to Claude often.

• Andrej Karpathy’s one-hour LLM field manual – still the clearest “how these things actually work” talk on YouTube (search vs Python interpreter vs file-upload modes, when to pay for O-tier models, etc.).

• My personal AI-SEO playbook I shared one issues ago – zero-click traffic from ChatGPT is up 81 % YoY; here’s the crawl-gate + schema pattern that’s working right now.

• Perplexity launches Comet – a full browser with built-in AI search, tab organizer, and an agent that can roam sites on your behalf. Early testers say “Arc, but with an autopilot.”

• xAI ships Grok-4 – new benchmarks show it nudging past OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro; a “Heavy” tier ($300/mo) unlocks multi-agent workflows. Musk claims it’s now the “smartest AI in the world”—grain of salt, but numbers look spicy.

Private Vibe Code Lab Community

I’m building a private room for 50 AI founders and vibe-coders (18 places already claimed)

Why only fifty? Small rooms breed trust. I want a cohort where everyone knows each other’s project, cheers the wins, and calls out the excuses.

Inside you’ll get:

• Lifetime access to every current and future guide—no upsells.

• Weekly calls: prompt tear-downs, stack autopsies, accountability check-ins.

• An async channel where questions actually get answers.

• Member-only experiments: early Cursor agent recipes, LLM bench data, design prompt libraries.

• One shared goal: ship, collect revenue, iterate.

more coming next week.
until then:

stay caffeinated.
lead the machine.
launch anyway.

☀️ Miron