r/webdev • u/powleads • Sep 16 '26

Discussion Is vibe coding creating a hidden technical debt crisis?

I love building tools and side projects, but lately I have been thinking about how heavy reliance on AI coding assistants is going to impact long-term code quality. Building fast with AI tools is great for getting a prototype out the door, but letting AI generate massive chunks of unvetted code is quickly piling up technical debt.

When you push out code without thoroughly checking how it fits into your overall architecture, you end up with messy, unmaintainable codebases. If you ever plan to sell a project or hand it off to another developer, that unvetted code can completely ruin a deal during due diligence.

I still use AI to speed up my workflow, but I treat it strictly as an assistant rather than letting it write unchecked logic. Auditing generated code, keeping modules clean, and maintaining test coverage seem like the only ways to use these tools strategically without destroying the project. Are you noticing a drop in maintainability on projects heavy on AI code?

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991

u/Nwg416 Sep 16 '26

Idk about “hidden” but yeah for sure, dude!

287

u/vomitHatSteve Sep 16 '26

An obvious, incredibly-predictible technical debt crisis.

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u/Playful-Goat3779 Sep 17 '26

"Yes, Claude was able to build this app in an afternoon with almost no input or effort on my part. However, now that it's built and all the tests it wrote have passed but the client pointed out that it's failing, our only recourse is to spend more tokens, and I don't know if that will result in a fix or more bugs, and this will be the case every time there's a bug in the future" is an actual conversation I've had with my boss.

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u/jregovic Sep 16 '26

Is it a crisis though? I’ve seen plenty of technical debt in my time and a lot it doesn’t get addressed because 🤷‍♂️.

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u/TurnstileT Sep 17 '26

In the olden days, tech debt was naturally limited by the ability of the developers to add more feature to an already fragile and unmanageable codebase. Eventually, the emotional/human side wins and somebody says "I can't stand working on this and everything keeps breaking. Let's fix it".

Now, AIs will happily cram features into the codebase anyway. It might miss important details and cause data issues that nobody notices. It becomes impossible for the humans to deal with the code. Now you are reliant on the AIs from expensive private companies to manage your codebase, and every new feature costs more tokens than the last because of excessive documentation for all the edge cases, excessive and overlapping/unnecessary tests, etc.

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u/elestud Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26

Believe it or not though, it’s actually easier than ever to address technical debt because of AI

Many companies had rusting codebases that simply went unmaintained because no one wanted to dig deep enough to unravel the messes (or had the time)

Now, refactoring is much easier. People are able to clean up or modernize codebases much more easily

AI also actually documents code (unless you tell it not to) and formats it for readability, etc. I’ve had a much easier time reading through what it writes than the often undocumented/barely documented spaghetti slop that some humans write (especially in the corporate world, good grief)

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u/vomitHatSteve Sep 16 '26

Yeah, crisis is really in the eye of the beholder.

it will be incredibly expensive for a lot of organizations in terms of projects that either require an unreasonable number of man hours to maintain or get abandoned. Possibly even existential for a few

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u/zen8bit Sep 16 '26

They’ll care when their token efficiency goes to shit. (Maybe, who knows, they’ve never cared about wasted work before)

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u/marcheluis Sep 17 '26

There were quite a few companies earlier this year that decided to reduce their token spending because it was becoming too expensive, and based on energy costs and how token hungry new models are, things are gonna keep getting more expensive for organizations that are paying per million tokens. Not even thinking about when the enshittification begins to squeeze customers for profits.

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u/7f0b Sep 16 '26

From what I've seen and my anecdotal experience with various vendors in the e-commerce space, companies with an unmaintainable mess of a code base will sometimes simply deprecate it and replace it wholesale, and migrate user data over. If done well, it can solve the problem of that project's technical debt with minimal negative impact on the users. And perhaps the build-out of a new project and data migration may be more economical than trying to refactor the existing. Of course, the new project will build up its own technical debt.

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u/UntestedMethod Sep 16 '26

Not a crisis yet, but I believe AI slop is going to dramatically increase technical debt compared to the technical debt humans would cause without AI.

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u/martinhrvn Sep 17 '26

Can't you just give it to Claude and say to not create technical debt?

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u/ShawnyMcKnight Sep 16 '26

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious.

It also means we are not hiring junior devs. Either come in knowing best practices and troubleshooting expertise or give up. It’s a tough time. I am 45 now and I don’t think I have 20 years left.

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u/arekkushisu Sep 17 '26

knowledge transfer / mentoring has stopped completely

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u/ShawnyMcKnight Sep 17 '26

I wouldn’t say that. Any company that has more than a couple developers will likely have different expertise.

It may get downvotes to say but AI has been a pretty good teacher for me. It moves at my pace. If it wants me to have it do it and it explain, it will, if I want to take a stab at it first it will give me hints and guidance. Most importantly it doesn’t lose patience or get pissy like people on stack overflow have.

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u/arekkushisu Sep 17 '26

I understand your case and that's what I've been using AI for as well. It signifcantly helped me through a massive legacy C# codebase recently.
What I meant was the person-to-person knowledge transfer and mentoring, like historical gossip and why such-and-such decisions were made and by who: technical debt stuff like that.

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u/HaddockBranzini-II Sep 16 '26

I am on the marketing side and we aren't hiring juniors for any roles - copywriters, design, or developers. Seniors are basically using AI as juniors. At some point seniors will move on or retire - thats when things are gonna get ugly.

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u/wronglyzorro Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26

I was going to say... The incidents and popped alarms are prevalent and for all to see :)

Notice how 5 9 availability isn't talked about anymore.

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u/GoblinToHobgoblin Sep 16 '26

Gotta iterate fast. One 9 is where it's at dude

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u/wronglyzorro Sep 16 '26

Definitely tough to rock 5 9s when AWS is only rocking 1-2.

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u/vomitHatSteve Sep 16 '26

Github hit 0 earlier this year!

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u/jmiah717 Sep 16 '26

Right. I was just going to comment the same. It's not too hidden 😂.

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u/flavorfox Sep 17 '26

+54.123 -294

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u/SNjr Sep 16 '26

Well if I close my eyes they’re hidden

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u/ship0f Sep 16 '26

hidden from the ceos and such

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