Audited vibe coding suggests partial fetal-like convergence of tumor proteomes

Abstract

The balance between how much human tumors recapitulate fetal tissue programs versus lose adult tissue identity remains unresolved. I used audited vibe coding, a human-mediated, cross-model critique-and-refinement workflow, to re-analyze a public pan-cancer proteomic atlas. A primary large language model wrote and executed the analysis under scientific direction, while a separate model family audited the code, outputs and claims; findings were returned for correction across seven versioned releases. Among 229 tumor-adjacent pairs in seven organs, tumor-minus-adjacent proteomic change partially aligned with reverse fetal-to-adult maturation (organ-balanced cosine, 0.240; 95% interval, 0.138 to 0.335), with positive alignment in 189 of 229 patients (82.5%). The organ-balanced projection coefficient was 0.195 (95% interval, 0.069 to 0.244), indicating movement along only part of the developmental distance. Although reverse maturation overlapped adult-identity loss, a positive developmental component remained after identity loss entered first (0.203; 95% interval, 0.129 to 0.239). Suppression of adult-high proteins contributed to more positive alignment than reactivation of fetal-high proteins. The vibe coding audits identified substantive defects. A common-mask correction reduced the matched-organ advantage from 0.074 to 0.059; a missing-value correction barely changed aggregate geometry but replaced 5 of the top 40 liver contributors; and coupled resampling repaired uncertainty accounting without changing patient scores. As with any single report, the "vibe reanalysis" biological results are candidate discoveries pending independent replication. The workflow is a single feasibility case, not a reliability benchmark, and shows how conversationally generated analysis can be made more inspectable when model-written code is treated as untrusted, versioned and subject to separate-model critique and executable checks.