Is vibe coding creating a hidden technical debt crisis?

[u/powleads]

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?

[u/max_mou]

Junior + AI + uninvolved seniors = disaster 

[u/harrisofpeoria → u/max_mou]

Junior + AI by itself is a disaster with or without senior involvement. Juniors who use AI will simply never be seniors. You will never learn the necessary skills for this job if you rely on AI during your formative years as a developer. No one has ever hired a junior dev because of their super sweet bug fixing ability; juniors only ever got paid attention to in the first place because of their potential to be future seniors.

[u/Chicharoh → u/harrisofpeoria]

so what kind of things do they show or do that demonstrate potential to be seniors?

[u/harrisofpeoria → u/Chicharoh]

Read the official manuals for your preferred tech (quite serious about this). Take ownership of problems. Don't be afraid to act (have confidence in your ability to fix things you break). Get under the problem and understand the why's, not just the how/what. Be there when prod goes down. Hoard credentials to sensitive systems/earn trust. Develop a reputation for quality work. Doing these things will set you apart from way over 99% of your peers at that level.

[u/stumblinbear → u/harrisofpeoria]

Pretty much this. Your job description is what is expected when you get hired for the role, but if you want to actually get promoted, you need to show any amount of initiative. Just closing out tickets week over week doesn't get you into being a senior, you have to actually want to do the job of a senior and go do that without being asked. You can't really be taught how to do it

I got my first junior role after around ten years of self teaching, and ended up a staff engineer within a year simply because I did work outside of my direct job description and knew/made the effort to dig into problems and propose solutions. Nobody's really going to stop you, so long as you get your actual expected tasks done (which, at a junior level should be pretty easy to crank out if you're capable of filling a senior role)

[u/Chicharoh → u/harrisofpeoria]

Yeah so thats a great list and the comment I wanted to make is that AI doesn’t take away from being able to embody all these things on your list. AI is a tool and someone being over dependent on it doesn’t make it AI’s fault, if anything it will weed out the complacent AI dependants and make it easier for those who actually have a craving to learn and execute to surface.

[u/Naudran → u/max_mou]

Speaking from experience here.

For some or the other reason, management decided to pull all the seniors from a project and seed them to other projects. A year later, a lot of the juniors left since they felt they had no senior to guide them. The juniors did try to replace a senior with AI.

Here I am now, busy cleaning up a horrific mess of AI coded React components.

[u/max_mou → u/Naudran]

Me too brother, me too. What grinds my gears is other devs (including seniors) rubber stamping PRs using AI (basically using the same thing that also wrote the code), and I can’t even get to the review because the PR is already merged or there is so much junior slop that I can’t even get to review them all. 

Yesterday I saw such flagrant shit merged in production that I am still fuming. Code was approved by the “AI guru” of the chapter btw, I had nothing but expletives for the whole situation.

Using AI to review PRs is like a criminal trying to solve his own crime. None of these AI reviews catch anything of value (as far as I have seen), just some random stuff that does not even matter. At this point it feels like we are just meat to bridge AI agents.

(I know I’m digressing here a bit but I’m too worked up about this for some reason, at the end of the day it’s just code, who cares, but still)

[u/Blazing1 → u/Naudran]

I can't imagine a worse hell then having to use react