Vibe coding cleanup is the structured process of taking AI-generated code, built quickly with tools like Lovable, Claude Code, or Cursor, and transforming it into a codebase that is stable, secure, scalable, and maintainable in a production environment. This allows for more customisation compared to low-code tools.

The term "vibe coding" was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy — the premise being that you describe what you want and the AI generates working code from your description. It's fast, accessible, and genuinely useful for prototyping. The problem is that AI is great at producing code that technically works, but is unreadable and extremely hard to debug. Beneath the surface, there are structural issues that make production launches risky: duplicated logic, oversized files, inconsistent patterns, and a lack of architectural intent.

The research on this is fairly stark. AI co-authored code shows elevated rates of logic errors, including misconfigurations that are 75% more common, and security vulnerabilities 2.74x higher than manually written equivalents. Code duplication increased approximately four times in volume among teams using AI coding tools.

A vibe code cleanup company doesn't rewrite your product from scratch. It audits what exists, identifies what's dangerous or unstable, refactors the structure, adds proper testing, addresses security vulnerabilities, and leaves you with a codebase that a real engineering team can actually work with. The goal is to turn your impressive demo into a product that can grow.

Before you start evaluating providers, it's worth being honest about what you're actually dealing with — because the right response to a vibe-coded codebase isn't always the same thing.

You probably need a cleanup company if:

Your app is in production with real users and you're experiencing: intermittent failures that are hard to reproduce, performance degradation under load, features that break other features when added, or error messages that nobody on your team can fully explain. These are structural problems. They don't get better with more vibe coding.

A developer reviewing your codebase has told you it's unmaintainable. This is the professional equivalent of a builder looking at load-bearing walls and going quiet. Take it seriously.

You're about to raise funding or bring on enterprise customers and due diligence will involve someone competent looking at your technical infrastructure. A vibe-coded codebase that hasn't been cleaned up is a material risk in that conversation.

You've done a security review — or been told you should — and the results are uncomfortable. Typical issues in AI-generated codebases include hidden security flaws such as SQL injection vulnerabilities, hallucinated functions or variables, and inconsistent naming or logic when the AI loses context in large projects. These aren't cosmetic problems.

You might not need a cleanup company if:

Your codebase is a pure prototype that you fully intend to rebuild. Not "intend to rebuild eventually" — actually, concretely scheduled to rebuild. In that case, cleanup investment in the prototype doesn't make sense; redirect the budget to the proper build.

The problems you're experiencing are actually product problems, not code problems. Sometimes the instability is coming from unclear requirements and scope changes rather than code quality. A cleanup company fixes the code; it doesn't fix a product that doesn't know what it is yet.

Understanding the process helps you evaluate whether a given company is describing something real or something that sounds like what you want to hear.

A legitimate cleanup engagement has several distinct phases:

The audit

Before anything is changed, the codebase is examined. A full view of what you actually have: architecture, dependencies, AI-written or rushed logic, test coverage, runtime behaviour, and release flow. The risky areas are mapped and priorities agreed, so cleanup doesn't turn into an endless refactor. The output is a prioritised plan ranked by business risk — what poses immediate danger, what's slowing delivery, and what can be addressed in a subsequent phase.

Security remediation

This is usually the most urgent category. SQL injection vulnerabilities, exposed credentials, missing authentication checks, improper data handling — these get addressed before anything else, because they're the problems that create real liability while everything else is being worked on.

Structural refactoring

Removing accidental complexity caused by vibe coding and cleaning up the parts that slow your team down: brittle logic, duplicated patterns, unclear abstractions, and AI-generated code that works "sometimes". Refactoring happens in small, controlled slices to keep production stable. This is different from a rewrite — it's surgical improvement rather than demolition and reconstruction.

Test coverage

Vibe-coded codebases almost universally lack adequate testing. Adding unit tests, integration tests, and where appropriate, end-to-end tests creates the safety net that allows future development to happen without constant fear of breaking things.

Documentation

Code that was generated without documentation is code that only the AI understands. Real documentation — covering architecture decisions, data flows, API contracts, and deployment processes — is what allows an engineering team to work with the codebase without relying on the original vibe coder to explain everything.

Handover

A cleanup company that simply delivers a refactored codebase without ensuring your team can work with it has done half the job. A good provider explains what was changed, why, and what the ongoing maintenance implications are.

The whole process should happen without halting your product. Cleanup work is scoped, scheduled, and coordinated to avoid collisions with active development. Instead of broad refactors, the focus is on targeted improvements: removing fragile logic, clarifying boundaries, and stabilising critical paths. That keeps changes predictable and reduces the chance of regressions.

This market is new enough that "vibe code cleanup company" isn't yet a consolidated category with clear quality signals. Here's how to navigate it.

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Start With Search, But Read Critically

A Google search for "vibe code cleanup" or "AI generated code cleanup" will return a range of providers — agencies, freelancers, and specialist companies who've positioned themselves around this use case. The search results are a starting list, not a quality ranking.

Read the content on their sites critically. Does it describe a specific, structured process with distinct phases? Or does it sound like a general software agency that's added "vibe coding cleanup" to their services page because the term is trending? The first is worth pursuing. The second requires considerably more scrutiny.

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Look for Evidence of the Actual Work

The same principle that applies to finding any development company applies here: real shipped results beat impressive descriptions.

Has this company cleaned up AI-generated codebases before? Can they describe specific structural problems they've encountered and how they resolved them? Do they have case studies that go beyond "the client was happy" to describe the actual state of the codebase before and after?

The before/after framing is specifically useful for cleanup work. A company that can articulate: "the codebase had X problems which manifested as Y symptoms, we addressed them through Z approach, the outcome was A" has demonstrated they understand what they're doing. A company that says "we improved code quality and the client was satisfied" has demonstrated nothing about their actual capability.

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Check Their Technical Depth

Vibe code cleanup is a genuinely technical discipline. The problems it addresses — security vulnerabilities, architectural fragility, testing gaps, performance bottlenecks — require developers who understand these things at a production level, not developers who've added AI code cleanup to their service list.

When you speak to a prospective company, ask technical questions. Not trick questions — honest questions about the kind of problems they encounter most frequently, how they approach security remediation, what their process is for adding test coverage to an untested codebase, and how they handle refactoring without breaking production. The quality of their answers tells you whether you're talking to people who do this or people who describe doing it.

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Understand Their Process Before Their Price

The single most important thing to understand about any cleanup company before engaging them is how they work — not what they charge. The process determines the outcome far more reliably than the price does.

Specifically: do they audit before they propose? Any credible cleanup company should assess your codebase before they quote for fixing it. A company that provides a fixed price for cleanup based on your description of the problem, without looking at the code, is either guessing or quoting for a smaller scope than you need.

Ask what the audit process looks like. How long does it take? What does it produce? Is there a cost for the audit, and is it credited against the cleanup engagement if you proceed? These are reasonable questions that any serious provider should be able to answer clearly.

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Ask About the Cleanup-Without-Disruption Problem

One of the most practically important questions in a cleanup engagement is: how does this happen while we're still running the product?

Your users are using the app. You may have active development happening. A cleanup process that requires a feature freeze, a staging period where nothing gets deployed, or a "we'll give you the fixed version in six weeks" delivery model creates business problems on top of your technical ones.

Ask explicitly: how do you manage cleanup in parallel with active development? How do you prevent the cleanup work from conflicting with features in progress? What does deployment look like during the cleanup period?

A company with real experience in this will have a clear answer. The approach involves isolating unstable or high-risk areas and working on them in controlled branches, so your team can keep shipping features in parallel. If the answer is vague, or if the company assumes your development will pause during cleanup, that's a practical problem worth understanding before you sign anything.

These are the signals that suggest you're talking to a company that actually does this well.

They want to see the code before they quote.

No credible cleanup company should price a job without understanding the extent of the problem. If they're quoting based on your description alone, they're either not thorough or not experienced.

They separate audit from cleanup.

The assessment phase and the remediation phase are distinct things. A company that jumps straight to "here's what we'll fix and what it'll cost" without an assessment first is compressing a process that requires information they don't yet have.

They describe security remediation as a distinct priority.

Cleanup companies that treat security as one line item among many have a different understanding of risk than companies that treat it as the first and most urgent category. Given that up to 40% of AI-generated database queries are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, security isn't a finishing touch — it's the foundation.

They talk about what comes after cleanup.

The best cleanup companies position themselves as the beginning of good engineering practice, not the end of a one-time engagement. Testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, documentation culture — these are the practices that prevent the codebase from degrading again. A company that helps you establish these is more valuable than one that simply hands back cleaner code.

Their communication is technical but accessible.

The company should be able to explain what's wrong with your codebase in language you can understand and act on — not hide behind jargon that keeps you dependent on their expertise. Clear technical communication is a quality signal, not a concession.

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A fixed price before seeing the code.

Already mentioned, but worth repeating. Any company that quotes for cleanup work without examining what needs cleaning either doesn't understand the problem or is quoting for a smaller scope than you need.

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No structured audit phase.

‍Cleanup without diagnosis is just guessing at what to change. A company without a defined audit process is a company that will either fix the wrong things or find new problems mid-engagement and revise their quote accordingly.

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They recommend a full rewrite immediately.

Sometimes a rewrite is genuinely the right call. But recommending one without first assessing the extent of the problem — or recommending one as the first and only option — suggests either a preference for larger engagements or a limited toolkit. Cleanup and rewrite are different services with different cost profiles. A company that can only offer one of them is not well-positioned to advise you on which you actually need.

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Vague answers to technical questions.

If the people you're speaking to can't describe the specific types of problems they encounter in vibe-coded codebases — and how they address them — they're probably generalist developers who've spotted a trending service category, not specialists in AI-generated code problems.

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No named developers on your project.

The bait-and-switch problem exists in cleanup engagements just as it does in development generally. Ask who will work on your codebase specifically, and get that in the contract.

These are the questions that surface capability, process, and fit — before any money changes hands.

"Can we start with a code audit before committing to the full cleanup? What does that involve and what does it produce?"

"What are the most common security vulnerabilities you encounter in vibe-coded codebases, and what's your remediation process?"

"How do you manage cleanup work in parallel with active product development?"

"What does the codebase look like at the end of the engagement — what can we do with it that we couldn't do before?"

"What do you put in place to prevent the same problems from accumulating again?"

"Who specifically will work on our codebase, and what happens if that person is unavailable?"

"Can you share an example of a cleanup engagement — what the codebase looked like before, what you changed, and what the outcome was?"

The quality of the answers to these questions will tell you more about a company's capability than their website, their case study page, or their pricing.

Vibe code cleanup pricing varies significantly based on the extent of the problems, the complexity of the codebase, and the provider's cost structure.

A basic security audit and critical vulnerability remediation for a small codebase: £3,000–£8,000.

A full cleanup engagement — audit, security remediation, structural refactoring, test coverage, documentation — for a startup-scale application: £10,000–£40,000 depending on codebase size and problem severity.

Larger, more complex codebases with significant architectural issues or compliance requirements: £40,000+.

Ongoing cleanup and maintenance retainers — where a team manages technical debt incrementally alongside active development: £2,000–£8,000/month.

The cost needs to be evaluated against the alternative: a security breach, a failed technical due diligence during fundraising, a rewrite that's far more expensive than cleanup would have been, or — the most common and least visible cost — a development team that's six times slower than it should be because the codebase resists every change they make.

We work with founders and technical teams who've built fast using AI coding tools and need to make what they've built production-ready.

We start with an audit — always, before anything else. We map what exists, identify what's dangerous, and produce a prioritised plan before a single line is changed. Then we work through it: security remediation first, structural refactoring in controlled stages, test coverage, documentation, and handover. All of this happens without halting your product — cleanup work is coordinated around active development, not instead of it.

We're also not going to recommend a full rewrite if cleanup is the right answer. And we'll tell you if it isn't.

If you've built something with AI tools that's getting complicated in ways you didn't expect — the sensible first step is a conversation about what you actually have and what it needs.

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Octogle Technologies works with founders and engineering teams whose AI-built products need to become production-ready. We start with the audit, work through cleanup in stages, and leave you with a codebase your team can actually build on. Talk to us about what you have and what you need.