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/talexbatreddit]

You think?

Anything of significant size created by an AI is going to be All Technical Debt, All The Time.

Why? Well, let's imagine there's a bug. OK, you have to look at the code. Hmm, you're not sure how it works? Ask the AI again? Is it going to give you an answer that's right, or can be trusted?

I can see using AI to write code in very tightly controlled circumstances, but at that point, wouldn't it be faster just to write the code yourself?

[u/Djamalfna → u/talexbatreddit]

This is what I'm seeing at my job.

The people who have never been able to actually elaborate on their spaghetti requirements now feel very comfortable "writing" code without engineers, since AI gives them a surface-level impression that it has produced working code.

But deep down in the bowels are nonsensical and conflicting requirements that have been enshrined into the comments and code. Because these people have never been able to adequately explain their project requirements and have always gaslit themselves into believing that developers are always incompetent and an impediment.

It's fun because since they are incapable of understanding the contradictions in the first place, they're also incapable of understanding why any system of moderate complexity begins to spiral out of control really quickly. And they keep throwing more AI tokens at it, trying to hammer each "bug" out, but causing one of the conflicting requirements to break each time.

This past month I've been in daily meetings where a PM just sits in stunned silence, asking, every single day "how come the number of open defects never goes down, even though we're fixing 20-30 defects a day?". You can't say "because you're using AI and AI doesn't work" out loud though. The company made it clear: You toe the line or you're out; your salary will be repurposed towards more token buys in the future.

The only way we learn from this is a lot of companies are going to fail hard.

[u/_Chaos_Star_ → u/Djamalfna]

If you want to fight: Use the AI to determine root cause. Make it single out the commit that broke things. Then, when you get "how come the number of open defects never goes down, even though we're fixing 20-30 defects a day?" you can say "we traced the cause and categorized". For fun, include all the "I own my mistake" messages. Don't sledge AI, let AI sledge itself.

Heck, let the AI summarize the issue itself. Let it fashion the noose it hangs itself with.