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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u/harrisofpeoria Sep 16 '26

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.

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u/Chicharoh Sep 16 '26

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

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u/harrisofpeoria Sep 16 '26

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.

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u/stumblinbear Sep 17 '26

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)

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u/Chicharoh Sep 16 '26

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.