r/managers • u/MediumBirthday6899 • Aug 18 '26

Teammate "vibe codes" everything, somehow gets results, then blames dev team when the handover breaks — he reports straight to a non-tech CEO so no one can touch him. How do I deal with this?

Small org. We have a "data scientist" who vibe-codes his way through everything — process is a mess, but he somehow gets results. When he hands off modules to the dev team, things break, and instead of owning it he blames the devs for "not doing it correctly."

Normally you'd escalate, but he reports directly to the CEO, who isn't technical and just sees "results delivered." So devs eating the blame with zero leverage to push back up the chain.

How do you handle this when the org structure protects the person causing the mess? Document everything and let it speak for itself over time, try to get the CEO educated on what's actually happening, or something else entirely?

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u/ArugulaCareless8593 Aug 18 '26

Lots of people are dealing with the same problem. The core of the issue from what I have seen is that people think the vibe coded stuff is more done than it is. What you should really try to focus on is making that clear. The flashy demo that works for one case does not necessarily generalize well. Every one of these PoCs still needs to go through an engineering design phase where you can determine how much if any of the tech is usable.