We've heard of "Shadow IT" now we have "Shadow SWE" and "Shadow CI/CD".

It used to be that someone wanted unfettered Internet access, and they were disgruntled with the company's firewall or proxy policy, and so they brought in a modem, and hooked it up to their desktop PC, and started dialing out on some analog line that the company didn't even know they had. Then it's all fine for 3 years until some malware gets discovered, and then IT discovers who-all had unauthorized lines that weren't being scanned or filtered at the company firewall. Same thing happens with WiFi APs today, of course.

I was working for a company that really offered no in-house software or tools to run. But my new supervisor was asking me to closely track my time. So I signed up for some SaaS that would let me log activities and track my timeslices, so I could show a graph or table later on and see what I was doing. I used it for a few weeks. It was real effective. But what I realized down the line, was that all the notes I was typing into this 3rd-party SaaS, were revealing company confidential information. And ultimately, I felt very uncomfortable about revealing what I was doing, on an unannounced and private project, and without authorization or even notifying my employer's IT department. So I shut it all down, and I had to do it with pen and paper, but that felt secure enough.

So if people are going to feel empowered by vibe coding their own bespoke apps, I hope their IT department comes down like a ton of bricks, and tells them to knock it off. Because it is not worth the tech debt, support costs, and ultimately the massive security problems and infoleaks. If your employer won't give you what you need in these terms, then maybe it's just not important to them in the first place.