You're vibe-coding alone at 2 AM. But who's reviewing your code?

You know the moment. The AI generated exactly what you needed. The feature works. You deploy right away because, let's be honest, you're flying solo and there's nobody else to ask.

Three weeks later, you're debugging a production issue that could've been caught in 30 seconds of review.

This isn't a judgement, we've all done it. When you're building solo or moving fast with AI coding tools, code review feels like an unnecessary speed bump.

Vibe-coding

"Vibe-coding" is what we call that flow state where you're building fast, often with AI assistance. Tools like Replit, Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt let you go from idea to deployed feature in minutes. GitHub Copilot writes half your functions. Claude and ChatGPT scaffold entire components.

It's incredible. It's also dangerous.

Here's the thing: AI makes you code faster, but it doesn't make you code better.

We analyzed PRs from solo developers using AI coding tools. The pattern was consistent:

• 40% more subtle bugs (off-by-one errors, incorrect null checks, misunderstood business logic)
• 60% more "works but shouldn't be in production" code

The AI gives you what you asked for. It doesn't know that your authentication check is incomplete or that you forgot to handle the edge case where the array is empty.

Why solo developers skip code review

The mental math makes sense at first:

• Creating a PR for yourself feels performative
• You wrote the code 10 minutes ago—you know what it does
• Slowing down breaks the vibe

So you merge to main, ship it, and deal with consequences later.

Consequences look like this:

• That 5-minute feature takes 2 hours to debug in production
• You spend Saturday morning fixing an issue you would've caught Thursday afternoon
• Your side project accumulates so much tech debt you abandon it
• You can't onboard contributors because the codebase is a mystery even to you

One founder told us they spent $3,000 fixing a payment bug that made it to production. The bug? A remaining Stripe test token hidden in the checkout flow. Something that would've been flagged instantly (and has been) by any code review tool. They were "moving too fast for process."

PRs are your safety net

Even when you're the only developer, pull requests serve three critical functions:

1. They force you to explain your changes

Writing a PR description makes you articulate why you made these changes. Future you (next week, next month, next year) will be incredibly grateful for this context. "Fixed bug" is useless. "Fixed race condition in WebSocket reconnection logic by adding mutex lock" is searchable, understandable, and debuggable.

2. They create reviewable chunks instead of commit soup

Look at your commit history honestly. It probably looks like:

• "wip"
• "fix"
• "actually fix"
• "god dammit"
• "this time for real"

PRs let you squash that into coherent, reviewable units of work. Each PR represents one logical change. Your Git history becomes documentation instead of a crime scene.

3. They catch bugs before they're your problem

Running automated review on a PR is your last line of defense.

We tested this with 50 solo developers over 3 months. Developers who used PRs + automated review caught 70% of bugs before deploy. Developers who committed directly to main? They spent 3x more time on bug fixes and rollbacks.

How CodeReviewr fits vibe-coding workflows

We built CodeReviewr specifically for developers who couldn't justify traditional code review tools. That means two things:

You pay per review, not per month.

If you're vibe-coding on weekends and ship 10 PRs a month, you pay ~$1.50. Not $15. Not $180/year. Just $1.50. Most months you'll stay inside the $5 free credit we give everyone.

Setup is literally 60 seconds.

Connect GitHub with OAuth. Done. No configuration files, no team setup. The next PR you open gets reviewed automatically. Works with any repo, any framework, any language.

This matters for vibe-coding because friction kills momentum. If setting up code review takes 30 minutes, you won't do it. If it takes 1 minute, you might.

It works with whatever you're already using

Replit, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, v0 -- if it pushes to GitHub, CodeReviewr works with it. You don't change your workflow or learn new tools.

Here's what that looks like:

1. You're building in Replit:

• Connect your Replit project to GitHub (they have native integration)
• Enable branch protection so changes require PRs
• Work in Replit like normal
• When you're ready to ship, create a PR from Replit or GitHub
• CodeReviewr automatically reviews it
• Merge

2. You're using Lovable or Bolt:

• These tools generate code and push to your GitHub repo
• Create a development branch for experimentation
• When a feature is done, open a PR to main
• CodeReviewr automatically reviews it
• Merge

3. You're using Cursor or Copilot locally:

• Same workflow you already have
• Push to a feature branch
• Open PR
• CodeReviewr automatically reviews it
• Merge

The pattern is identical: whatever pushes to GitHub can trigger a review.

What CodeReviewr actually catches

We're not trying to replace your judgment. We're trying to catch the stuff you miss when you're moving fast:

• Type errors and null reference bugs (the classics)
• Functions that do too much (complexity warnings)
• Unused imports and dead code (cleanup you meant to do)
• Security issues like exposed secrets or SQL injection risks
• Inconsistent naming or patterns (helps with future maintenance)
• Functions that are too complex (complexity warnings)
• Files that are too large (size warnings)

We analyzed our first 300+ reviews and found the most common catches were:

• Missing error handling
• Incorrect null checks
• Unused variables and imports
• Overly complex functions
• Security issues

None of these are glamorous. All of them cause production bugs.

The vibe-coding workflow that actually works

After talking to hundreds of solo developers, here's the pattern that sticks:

1. Build however you want (Replit, Lovable, Cursor, raw vim, whatever)
2. Open PRs when features are "done" (not when they're perfect)
3. Let automated review catch the obvious stuff (2-3 minutes)
4. Fix the issues (often automatically)
5. Merge and deploy

Total added time: ~5 minutes per feature. Time saved in debugging: 30-120 minutes per bug caught.

Try it today (free credits included)

We give everyone $5 in free credits (~10-30 reviews depending on code complexity). For most developers, that's 1-2 months of free usage.

No credit card required. Connect GitHub, open a PR, see what we catch.

If you're vibe-coding and shipping fast, you don't need process for process's sake. But you do need something watching for the bugs you miss when you're in flow state. That's what we built this for.

We're continuing to improve detection for AI-generated code patterns based on feedback from developers using Cursor, Replit, and similar tools. If you catch something we miss, let us know—we're building this with you, not at you.