If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Do It in C

As more developers experiment with LLM-assisted “vibe coding” - sketching out functionality first and tightening the bolts later - C has a surprisingly pragmatic appeal. What’s notable here isn’t nostalgia; it’s the ABI. Under the hood, C exposes a stable calling convention that most runtimes speak fluently. A quick C shim can be dlopen’d from Python, called via Rust’s extern "C", wrapped through Node’s N-API, or compiled to WASI for sandboxed execution. That makes C an efficient target for AI‑generated prototypes that need to plug into heterogeneous stacks without wrestling bespoke FFI layers.

The bigger picture: constraints help. C’s explicit types and memory model force ambiguities out of LLM output, and the ecosystem has mature guardrails - compile-time warnings, sanitizers (ASan/UBSan), valgrind, and dead-simple fuzzing (libFuzzer/AFL) - to quickly surface undefined behavior. Performance is measurable, the binary is portable, and the ABI can be kept stable even if you later harden internals in Rust or C++ behind the same C interface. Worth noting: you still need discipline on safety (no unchecked pointers, no undefined lifetimes), and C won’t save a sloppy design. But if the goal is to rapidly prototype components that interoperate everywhere and can be productionized incrementally, targeting C is less about vibes and more about choosing the lingua franca of systems.