On April 4, 2026 german court basically outlawed the usage of vibe coding for commercial products.

The details can be read (german only) in the published court decision.

I will try to summarize the court decision in english in the hope that other countries will follow, because this is actually a good thing.

What happens when you vibe code?

When vibe coding, you describe your target as close as possible in prompts like 'Build me a web service that allows me to manage a TODO list'.

Now LLMs are generally working in the way, that they calculate, which word parts are statistically besides next word parts in the current contents, based on its training data, which is for a big part internet pages, like for example github or sourceforge.

It then - after a few round trips of prompts and answers - spits out some code that is either one of the following 2 options:

Option 1: Direct copy from the internet

With a high chance it will spit out a 1 to 1 copy from the internet that does what you want. The chances are high, that this code comes from a github or sourceforge project, that is under GPL, LGPL or similar licenses. These licenses do not allow you to copy and/or modify the code into your own project.

In this case, you are doing a clear copyright infringement and if you publish your product, chances are high, you are getting sued and lose the case, because the case is 100% legit. You illegally copied code from an open source project.

The court decision mentioned does not handle this case, because it is not necessary, it is a clear copyright violation.

Option 2: New code bassed on existing projects

It might build new code from several sources and/or translates it into the programming language you asked it.

In this case, you are basing your work on an existing project. Copyright law says, that a product similar to another product, to be able to be copyrighted, must have a far enough distance to the original product, with enough added human creative work to be able to be seen as a new product.

The court now decided, that AI is not adding human creative work. Which means, even if your code is in another programming language or looks signifficantly different from the original source, it still is seen as a copright violation, because nothing of value has been added, and you can be sued by the original copyright holder.

This means, with every piece of code generated via vibe coding, according to german courts, you are creating a copyright infringement. While this is not a problem, as long as you create a little tool that you use yourself to speed up your workflow. But as soon as you are creating a commercial product with it, you probably end up in court and pay a lot of money... and if you ask us: That is great news!