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I recently ran an experiment where I tried to use _quantitative signals_ (and not _qualitative_ ones) to tell whether something is vibe-coded or not.

My idea was that, if I see that your project is growing 10k LOC per week and you're the only developer working on it, it's most likely vibe-coded.

I analyzed some open-source projects, but unfortunately it turns out not to be so clear cut. It's relatively easy to estimate the growth rate of a project, but figuring out how much time developers worked on it is very error prone, which results in both false positives and false negatives.

I wrote a post about it (https://pscanf.com/s/352/) if you're interested in the details.

The biggest signal is not the code itself but whether the thing is actively and continually developed for more than a few weeks.

And then look through the commits -- were they only adding new features, or did the author(s) put effort into improvements on engineering fundamentals (benchmarking, testing, documentation, etc)?

Ask a llm for a code review along code duplication, encapsulation and sequential coupling as quality axes and the difference should show up readily