Is Vibe Coding Safe? Benchmarking Vulnerability of Agent-Generated Code in Real-World Tasks
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Vibe coding is a new software development paradigm in which human engineers prompt a large language model (LLM) agent to complete complex coding tasks with little supervision. Although vibe coding is increasingly adopted, is the generated code really safe to deploy in production? To investigate this question, we propose SUSVIBES, a benchmark consisting of 186 feature-request software engineering tasks from real-world open-source projects, for which, human programmers committed vulnerable implementations. We evaluate 12 widely used coding agentic settings with frontier models on the benchmark. Disturbingly, all agents perform poorly in terms of software security. Although 57% of the solutions from SWE-Agent with Claude 4 Sonnet are functionally correct, only 11.8% are secure. Further experiments demonstrate that preliminary security strategies, such as augmenting the feature request with vulnerability hints, cannot mitigate these security issues. Our findings raise serious concerns about the widespread adoption of vibe coding, particularly in security-sensitive applications. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/susvibes. The leaderboard is at https://leililab.github.io/susvibes-leaderboard.
Key facts. Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2025.
Builds on
36 of 68 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Tasks13 Jun
- 2025CVE-Bench: A Benchmark for AI Agents' Ability to Exploit Real-World Web Application Vulnerabilities21 Mar
Other references · 34
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- 2019Devign: Effective Vulnerability Identification by Learning Comprehensive Program Semantics via Graph Neural Networkscited by 266
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- 2025CWEval: Outcome-driven Evaluation on Functionality and Security of LLM Code Generationcited by 55
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- 2025Vibe Coding in Practice: Motivations, Challenges, and a Future Outlook -- a Grey Literature Reviewcited by 28
- 2025SoRFT: Issue Resolving with Subtask-oriented Reinforced Fine-Tuningcited by 27
- 2025Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligencecited by 26
- 2025Thinking Longer, Not Larger: Enhancing Software Engineering Agents via Scaling Test-Time Computecited by 25
- 2025Co-PatcheR: Collaborative Software Patching with Component(s)-specific Small Reasoning Modelscited by 12
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- 2025SEAlign: Alignment Training for Software Engineering Agentcited by 11
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 17.
18 papers.
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- 2026Risky-Bench: Probing Agentic Safety Risks under Real-World Deploymentcited by 8
- 2026MOSAIC-Bench: Measuring Compositional Vulnerability Induction in Coding Agentscited by 3
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- 2026Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoning31 Aug 2026
- 2026Vibe Coding and Web Application Security: A Twin-Prompt Study21 Aug 2026
- 2026Setup Complete, Now You Are Compromised: Weaponizing Setup Instructions Against AI Coding Agents16 Jul 2026
- 2026Distributed Denial of Science: How Indirect Data Poisoning of AI Systems Can Industrialize Scientific Fraud12 Jul 2026
- 2026Why Trust Your Agent? Empirical Security Gains from TRiSM-Guided Agentic Workflows in Healthcare27 Jun 2026
- 2026SEVRA-BENCH: Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents11 Jun 2026
- 2026SWE-WebDevBench: Evaluating Coding Agent Application Platforms as Virtual Software Agencies6 May 2026
- 2026MOSAIC-Bench: Measuring Compositional Vulnerability Induction in Coding Agents5 May 2026
- 2026When RAG Chatbots Expose Their Backend: An Anonymized Case Study of Privacy and Security Risks in Patient-Facing Medical AI1 May 2026
6 more
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- 2026Constitutional Spec-Driven Development: Enforcing Security by Construction in AI-Assisted Code Generation31 Jan 2026
- 2026The Vibe-Check Protocol: Quantifying Cognitive Offloading in AI Programming2 Jan 2026
- 2025Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebases11 Dec 2025
- 2025Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebasescited by 11
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- 2026SEVRA-BENCH: Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agentscited by 1
- 2026Setup Complete, Now You Are Compromised: Weaponizing Setup Instructions Against AI Coding Agentscited by 1
- 2026SWE-WebDevBench: Evaluating Coding Agent Application Platforms as Virtual Software Agenciescited by 0
- 2026Why Trust Your Agent? Empirical Security Gains from TRiSM-Guided Agentic Workflows in Healthcarecited by 0
- 2026Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoningcited by 0
- 2026A Lean and Spec-Driven AI-Assisted Software Development Lifecycle for Applied AI Education: The AI-SDLC Approachcited by 0
- 2026AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agentscited by 0
- 2026AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agents1 Oct 2026
- 2026A Lean and Spec-Driven AI-Assisted Software Development Lifecycle for Applied AI Education: The AI-SDLC Approach21 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoning31 Aug 2026
- 2026Setup Complete, Now You Are Compromised: Weaponizing Setup Instructions Against AI Coding Agents16 Jul 2026
- 2026Why Trust Your Agent? Empirical Security Gains from TRiSM-Guided Agentic Workflows in Healthcare27 Jun 2026
- 2026SEVRA-BENCH: Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents11 Jun 2026
- 2026SWE-WebDevBench: Evaluating Coding Agent Application Platforms as Virtual Software Agencies6 May 2026
- 2026MOSAIC-Bench: Measuring Compositional Vulnerability Induction in Coding Agents5 May 2026
- 2026Chasing the Public Score: User Pressure and Evaluation Exploitation in Coding Agent Workflows22 Apr 2026
- 2026Risky-Bench: Probing Agentic Safety Risks under Real-World Deployment3 Feb 2026
- 2025Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebases11 Dec 2025
- 2026The Vibe-Check Protocol: Quantifying Cognitive Offloading in AI Programmingcited by 2
- 2026Constitutional Spec-Driven Development: Enforcing Security by Construction in AI-Assisted Code Generationcited by 1
- 2026Human-Certified Module Repositories for the AI Agecited by 0
- 2026Vibe Coding and Web Application Security: A Twin-Prompt Studycited by 0
- 2026SecureVibe: Making Vibe Coding More Securecited by 0
- 2026SecureVibe: Making Vibe Coding More Secure29 Sep 2026
- 2026Vibe Coding and Web Application Security: A Twin-Prompt Study21 Aug 2026
- 2026Human-Certified Module Repositories for the AI Age3 Mar 2026
- 2026Constitutional Spec-Driven Development: Enforcing Security by Construction in AI-Assisted Code Generation31 Jan 2026
- 2026The Vibe-Check Protocol: Quantifying Cognitive Offloading in AI Programming2 Jan 2026
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