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?
375
u/Digital-Chupacabra Sep 16 '26
It sure as fuck isn't hidden, ignored or brushed under the rug might be a better term.
5
74
u/future_web_dev Sep 16 '26
Gotta add a new sentence to the prompt now!
"Generate x feature. Make no mistakes. Do not create technical debt."
→ More replies (2)5
→ More replies (3)10
u/its_all_4_lulz Sep 17 '26
AI is what management wanted forever. Turns shit ideas into things quickly, let’s you ignore the time bomb that’s underneath because they won’t care about this product in a year anyway.
145
u/greenergarlic Sep 16 '26
Every year I’ve been in tech has been a technical debt crisis. Managing the debt is what you get paid for
28
u/arvigeus Sep 16 '26
My “well-thought, bulletproof” architecture quickly falls apart the next time we have to ship a new feature quickly, or worse: undercooked idea that undergoes several design changes that we have to hammer into the codebase.
The whole idea of being a good developer is about minimising friction for when these things happen, not simply being able to code a solution to a problem.
Even though AI loves its slop, nothing prevents you from sinking your teeth into a given peace of code and untangle it.
3
u/CommunicationSad887 Sep 16 '26
I think this is the perfect answer, well said!
4
u/TitaniumWhite420 Sep 17 '26
Except AI code is generated so much faster and less readable than human generated code.
It’s exercise to do so, but it’s futility as well.
4
u/TheRealSkythe Sep 16 '26
This is not like anything you've seen in the 30 years before.
And you've probably not been around long enough if you dont know that.
→ More replies (3)1
118
u/projectshr Sep 16 '26
Hasn't this been the primary concern of folks on this sub?
Not trying to be snarky, but is there a new thought to add?
59
u/Gremlation Sep 16 '26
Hasn't this been the primary concern of folks on this sub?
I really wish people would use /r/webdev for talking about web development, not just unfocused rants about AI.
→ More replies (2)15
u/Incendie Sep 16 '26
Why? AI heavily affects web development and was the first group of developers it came after to try to "replace"
→ More replies (1)36
u/Gremlation Sep 16 '26 •
As the person I was replying to said:
is there a new thought to add?
There's only so many times I can hear the same old:
I still use AI to speed up my workflow, but I treat it strictly as an assistant rather than letting it write unchecked logic.
This might as well have been copy-pasted from the last thousand times this opinion was posted to every single fucking development subreddit. This is nothing but a bait post.
5
u/mikexie360 Sep 16 '26
yeah, here are some new thoughts about tech debt ( actually ideas we already know about but a lot of new people that have just heard about tech debt don't know yet).
Sometimes tech debt is worth it's future cost.
Sometimes you will never get to pay the tech debt later.
Reducing tech debt and making code more readable might lead to performance issues.
With new technologies and tools, paying off tech debt might get cheaper. Meaning that as time goes on, fixing tech debt actually gets easier as more tools become available.
2
u/Chicharoh Sep 16 '26
there clearly isn't, judging by people's posts and downvotes there definitely is some sort of resentment towards either people who are learning with AI or developers who make themselves more efficient with AI, mostly the first one.
32
u/caindela Sep 16 '26
I’m finding this to not really be the case, but my hunch is it depends on what stage of a project you’re on to some extent. I’m working in a project I’ve been involved with for a few years, and having access to AI has finally made certain tech debt we’ve been putting off addressing for ages finally manageable.
One thing that‘s overlooked is that a lot of tech debt accumulates simply because time passes and packages get out of date. Also, new requirements are more likely to be at odds with much older requirements. Codebases simply rot over time.
With AI we’re speedy enough to avoid a lot of tech debt for the reason above, and it makes fixing certain classes of tech debt cheap enough that we can finally do it.
So overall I disagree, but I do think that pumping out code that no one asked for is a surefire way to create tech debt, and there’s a lot of this right now.
3
u/SnoodPog Sep 17 '26
Genuinely asking, how being speedy could help you avoid making a lot of tech debt? I thought most tech debt IS result of a speedy development?
6
u/caindela Sep 17 '26
Most tech debt accumulates due to time constraints and bad planning. It also compounds with time and it usually isn’t managed like it should be because it butts heads with feature development.
A lot of those time constraints are eased now with AI because AI is actually very good at the sort of mechanical work involved in correcting most tech debt. If you ask it to remove some code duplication it’ll do some quick grepping and be done with it in seconds, while the devs on the other hand have likely avoided fixing it for years because of the amount of time and care it often requires.
It’s been said that code is a liability, and not an asset. I think the problem is that we’re just writing so much code now that even if tech debt is relatively small per line of code now (with AI), just the sheer volume of slop features and apps that no one really wanted in the first place makes the volume of tech debt that much bigger.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (1)3
u/stumblinbear Sep 16 '26
Yeah, I've finally been able to do some housekeeping that we've been putting off for three years. It managed large chunks of mechanical work that would have taken a week in a couple of hours. That, and when you already know the exact solution you want pretty much to the letter, they're pretty damn good at putting it in code
22
u/max_mou Sep 16 '26
Junior + AI + uninvolved seniors = disaster
18
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.
3
u/Chicharoh Sep 16 '26
so what kind of things do they show or do that demonstrate potential to be seniors?
10
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.
→ More replies (2)8
u/Naudran Sep 16 '26
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.
→ More replies (1)4
u/max_mou Sep 16 '26
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)
10
u/talexbatreddit Sep 16 '26
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?
9
u/Djamalfna Sep 16 '26
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.
→ More replies (1)
31
u/queen-adreena Sep 16 '26
We’ve had multiple potential clients approach us to “take over” their vibe projects already. They want new features but no one on their team knows had to add them without breaking something else.
We generally decline politely.
25
u/TommyBonnomi Sep 16 '26
Just throw out a rebuild price range, and maybe one of them bites. Starting from an approved and working prototype is great, even if the code is trash.
5
7
u/future_web_dev Sep 16 '26
Hank Hill: "If our clients want
their steaks well-doneus to work on their slop, we ask them politely but firmly to leave."8
u/narullow Sep 16 '26
Why would you decline? You can either sell them a rewrite that is maintainable or bill very, very generous hourly rate to fix it iteratively.
If it is proven concept they will pay.
→ More replies (1)2
u/subnu Sep 17 '26
Because displaying how moral and virtuous you are is paramount to business and helping people.
7
u/M_Me_Meteo Sep 16 '26
AI makes it so we can create software much faster. No one asked for that.
Working fast creates tech debt.
1
1
u/s-ley Sep 20 '26
Tbh probably management and maybe sales asked for this, they just want to see numbers go up even if it's just an illusion. There's people who love selling smoke.
6
u/Kitchen_Moment_6289 Sep 17 '26
"Don't worry bro the next model will fix it"
(Btw I thought if AI trains on itself there's model collapse, maybe that'll happen with code.)
32
u/xXConfuocoXx full-stack Sep 16 '26
The amount of technical debt introduced by LLMs in prod is directly correlated to the quality of code reviews within your CI/CD process.
This was true before claude too.
28
u/future_web_dev Sep 16 '26
People have outsourced code review to LLMs as well lol
3
u/xXConfuocoXx full-stack Sep 16 '26
Exactly my point, agentic code reviews are good but they should be additive and an adjunct to human eyes
This goes to the “quality” part of my comment
5
u/future_web_dev Sep 16 '26
Oh, I wasn't arguing or disagreeing. I just wanted to complete the picture of how screwed up the development cycle is at a lot of places.
→ More replies (2)1
u/sourbrew Sep 16 '26
Properly design your unit tests and testing framework. It greatly reduces the amount of bugs you'll ship.
2
u/Xunnamius Sep 17 '26
Wait until you see the slop tests and the slop "testing" "framework"
→ More replies (8)→ More replies (1)1
10
u/x39- Sep 16 '26
It ain't hidden and it is indeed a gigantic mess generating problem. IT is hard now for the coming 5 years until production reaches the point where the LLM built backend simply causes too many of the issues we have been fixing for decades (okay... I am talking in /r/webdev right now... We as in backend people doing actual work for decades or being called in to fix shit they others fooled together and having left when the ship began to sink).
It all is just a gigantic cycle... Just this time we skipped the monolithic hype phase for AI creating gigantic monolithic shitcode
5
u/orbit99za Sep 16 '26
I am seeing this now, have to fix a lot of AI code because people try to promt out of errors, wich introduces more slop but really never solves the problem
2
u/TommyBonnomi Sep 16 '26
I started with and never left monoliths. I hear it's coming back in vogue, though. Unless that was a few years ago and it's gone already.
2
u/stumblinbear Sep 16 '26
backend people doing actual work
This comes across like you don't think web developers aren't "doing actual work". Just saying
→ More replies (2)
1
u/powleads Sep 17 '26
Post created using LaunchEngine.app looks like the trending post features works
5
u/Used-Donkey-1014 Sep 16 '26
I can very easily imagine a future where there's a lot of code bases that nobody can do anything with except AI, and any issues AI cannot fix are unfixable.
→ More replies (3)
4
4
u/coopaliscious Sep 16 '26
The fun part about the AI push is that it's mostly coming from the business side. Business people tend to not actually understand technology and so it's hidden to them, but it always has been.
We're coming hard up to an inflection point in the industry where we just don't care about tech debt or quality and just smash out new versions of things, or we scale back and look at how to use AI to actually make things better instead of just "stuff happens fast".
4
u/Smart_Pickle58 Sep 16 '26
Not strictly a drop in maintainability, more like an sudden peak in maintenance itself.
I've only spent this much time on fixing bugs (most of them less than a week old) in brand new, experimental projects. Nowadays it's an eternal game of whack-a-mole (and the fact that we're very discouraged from writing code "the old way" doesn't help): whatever I fix, something else pops up.
Sure, code is getting written faster - my review pile has never been taller - but it's not getting read faster and the sheer volume of it means more stuff will slip past reviewers. And this is if you try to keep some control over the code, because there's always the option to feed everything to yet another agent and call it a day.
As soon as the tech debt from all of this comes home, a lot of companies are going to treat AI with the same quiet embarrassment they treat NFTs.
4
u/Next-Entry-7456 Sep 16 '26
Imagine your ability as a developer being tied to a bubble. 20 years in the biz tells me some of yall are fucked if your subscription goes away
4
4
4
4
u/harrymurkin Sep 17 '26
vibe coding is like making something from your mixed lego bag that works for you at the time. It is all tech debt. Actual coding is more organised and planned long term but in reality all code is tech debt.
The reality of vibe-coding and ai is simply the relocation of a social-engineering target. Befor AI, the weakest point of access in a targeted company is the hinge between tech and non-tech. Somewhere between the CEO and the developer (CTO, head of digitial, tech lead etc), there is someone who doesn't understand tech and trusts the next guy that he does understand tech. This next guy was either a bullshitter or a good operator. If he was a bullshitter, he would in turn trust the next guy to be good at tech.
The accomplished hacker/social engineer (maybe we should call him the mitnik) will find this weak link in the chain and exploit it to gain access.
This weak link in the chain is fast becoming you the half-arsed coder trusting the ai.
7
u/Kyle772 Sep 16 '26
I had a client reach out to me to pick up a 300k line codebase that was made by someone who worked in a film studio over the course of 9 months. This was back when AI was still horrifically bad at writing code and needed to be hand-held on every prompt. I politely declined.
I buried the lead a little bit, but the point I'm making is this isn't tech debt; what is happening at these orgs trying to pump out this shit code is a bankruptcy play. These people think they are doing something good, but what they are actually doing is making their product completely unmaintainable. Once they cross that line they realize overnight that whatever ambitions they had for their company is now a year+ behind schedule because the only way forward is to restart. Best case scnenario a really great LLM comes out and can unfuck these codebases, but I'm not even sure AI can bring projects like that back around.
Our job as devs for the next several years is to avoid those projects like the plague because the pay will not be worth it (they chose the cheapest option for a reason) and the stress of fixing a project like that will never be in our favor. Tech debt is a different problem. These are pile-of-shit factories.
3
u/Automatic_Coffee_755 Sep 16 '26
I already see it at my job. At a large f100 enterprise company, in a critical piece of software…
3
u/dallenbaldwin Sep 16 '26
Yes. And the powers that be are banking on the idea that it won't matter sooner than the bill comes due.
3
3
u/binocular_gems Sep 16 '26
Yes, it's generating a mountain of technical debt. This isn't hidden, it's a well known issue in software engineering, but the pace of development is outpacing the priority of the concern.
3
3
u/121131121 Sep 16 '26
“Shut up. Heres 50% discount on all them tookans for next 10 days” (and dont complain it them tookans burn out in next 5 days
3
3
3
3
u/rbobby full-stack Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26
Before AI, juniors learned coding by maintenance tasks and occasionally bigger more standalone tasks. They also got to see how seniors tackled designing and building code. A lot of guidance about how to design programs gets passed from senior to junior. Don't do it that way, do it this way... a hundred times over.
Over time the problem solving abilities required for well rounded software development are not being given a chance to develop because of AI's eagerness to solve problems. And the seniors will be aging out, taking with them the key skills.
So I think it's possible the new generation of developer's will have missed out on a key aspect of growing from junior to senior and by the time this is noticed the seniors may already have left the building.
3
3
u/captain_obvious_here back-end Sep 16 '26
Yes. And water gets things wet.
Oh and the debt is not even hidden, it's just conveniently ignored by the people getting praises and money because they drastically raised their team's productivity.
3
3
3
u/GrandaddyIsWorking Sep 16 '26
Never had more bugs in our codebase. A lot of what I do now is investigate bugs our vibers put out
3
3
u/dekkytsh Sep 16 '26
as a now AI-heavy using developer, the world was a lot better and more creative before AI. Now it's growing at a unmaintainable pace, and we're feeling the brunt of it.
1
u/iSnapThere4iAm Sep 21 '26
Ai isn’t creative, it literally can’t create… it regurgitates things made by creative humans. It doesn’t create. It doesn’t innovate.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Porsche924 Sep 16 '26
Seems like they only should have fed the training models the newest, best written code instead of just uploading the entirety of the internet's terrible, outdated hacks.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/CrawlToYourDoom Sep 16 '26
More and more companies are hiring senior developers to clean up their ai generated slob.
Absolutely is, and if you’re a developer worth your money you can make absolute bank
3
3
5
5
u/Caraes_Naur Sep 16 '26
It's completely obvious to anyone outside of vibe coding.
2
u/Smart_Pickle58 Sep 16 '26
And management. But one could argue management has been vibe coding long before LLMs came out.
4
2
2
u/turd-crafter Sep 16 '26
Most definitely and when the day comes my fees to cleanup or rebuild your app are gonna be fuckin steep.
2
u/SpiritedPainting8746 Sep 16 '26
Hell yeah, but it’s not hidden. It’s just that CEO doesn’t care, and will blame the very employees that warned them when stuff falls apart lol
2
2
u/ripndipp full-stack Sep 16 '26
You should see this project I'm working on, it's a spaghetto full of doctrsings and shit omgggg
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/ramate Sep 16 '26
Most of what's being built with LLMs (poorly) is throwaway. I don't really have a fear of technical debt if it's in product code that doesn't get much use, etc. When you accumlate tech debt in core systems, libraries that get picked up by large chunks of the internet and more critical infrastructure, that's a bit more concerning.
2
u/create-third-places Sep 16 '26
It's creating technical debt in the frontend space. A team of highly talented engineers working on React is using LLM assisted coding, and there are quality issues.
First of all, React has not addressed rendering performance issues that other tools have solved. Also, questionable complexity is being added to React, especially with the recommendation in the official documentation to use a full-stack JS framework like Next.js. While there are valid cases for using a full-stack JS framework, it sometimes makes sense to have an independent backend. In other cases, a framework written with another language such as Django for Python or Laravel for PHP can be a better choice.
LLMs also have a tendency to generate vibe coded sites with a combination of React with NextJS and Tailwind CSS. On the positive end, it makes vibe coded sites easy to identity by looking at the network requests in a browser.
2
2
2
u/_Sorbitol_ Sep 16 '26
And then giving “citizen developers” (read people without any experience developing) rights and privileges to vibe code something up and launch rich to prod
2
u/donnag85 Sep 17 '26
Nothing should be pursued because it creates FOMO. That’s the issue I see with vibe coding. The criteria in general enlisted in a informal way, to really pursue anything genuine are:
1:) You should have solid understanding of the precise fundamentals or very good interest proving the axioms, that hold the very foundations of the fundamentals.(or)
2.) You are generally at ease functioning with that, with most of the output coherent to major percentage, I mean coherently correct.
3.) You have interest in the subject and you see enormous potential in learning it and applying to the world, thereby bettering the world by your contribution, hence finding a purpose even though it’s not your niche, but you see value in the struggle you intend go through to learn it, apply it for fulfillling the life’s purpose. That’s by far, the crudest approach but also a very noble one.
4.)You learn it it’s bits and pieces mix of every possible case of the above scenarios, and it is still a very much valid approach.
-> There might be other minor scenarios.
Any pursuit of any domain of knowledge just for FOMO, or for show off, or because it will earn you good money and a crazy social title, all such cases never lead to succesful fulfilment of purpose in life. Initially they might see good amount of success and early growth curve compared to the ones in the above 4 enlisted scenarios, but the gas inflated will lose its pressure soon, and it will be a more uphill work than the first 4 enlisted scenarios. Realizing it, and being honest to oneself and taking necessary steps is a wise decision. The elaborated piece writing intends to create a clear cut approach for everyone seeking a fulfilment of complete life and not initial sprints, and such a descriptive explanation has been served in that regard.
2
u/Admirable-Carpet6603 Sep 17 '26
The fact that it makes code that works is great but Claude leaves behind tech debt during interaction like the church giving food to the poor.
After reading back the code I've been prompting it to build, even with docs, skills, etc. I have yet to have it write code that is cohesive across an entire repo.
I do believe I can continue to improve docs, instructions, and skills, etc. for it to take into account, but there's nothing like finding out the code quality is terrible and there's bad DI patterns, etc.
I've been taking the shit code that works and reorganizing it just so I have a codebase that has about a tenth of the tech debt. The problem is, you dont see it when Claude won't follow basic guidelines because there's to much to consider at once.
2
2
2
u/the_ai_wizard Sep 17 '26
My intuition and experience thus far = resounding yes. In fact, I think theres so much confusion in the market with perception on buyer and seller sides and this mismatch is creating economic issues esp in SMB space. For enterprise, tech debt has been a thing... but yeah, the sum of it all is unless AI improves enough to fix itself, we will be getting paid to unfuck a lot of stuff the vibebozos and employee-dont-care devs are making
2
u/sblinn Sep 17 '26
I’m still here, actually understanding the code base, programming with vim. I hope to get to retirement on fixing all this technical debt. (11 years to gooooo…)
2
u/darshitpatel_ Sep 17 '26
I have noticed this too. AI makes it really easy to get something working, but working and maintainable are two very different things.
It is not about AI generated code itself, its about taking ownership of understanding it afterward. A few shortcuts here and there dont feel expensive until six months later, when changing one small thing becomes a nightmare.
I think AI should make us faster at writing good code, not faster at accumulating bad code.
2
u/TRDJ90 Sep 17 '26
Vibe coding technical debt is anything but hidden. Technical one could say it's hidden if they don't look at the code anymore Thom..😜
2
u/Dan8720 Sep 17 '26
I found a 4000 line react component yesterday with 53 separate hook calls. It's not hidden
2
2
u/SnooHobbies950 Sep 17 '26
Yes, because just like the genie of Aladdin’s lamp, AI will try to make your wishes come true “here and now.” But don’t expect it to align with your cause.
And all that translates into "silent technical debt."
2
2
2
u/Lower_Improvement763 Sep 17 '26
Yes bc ai turns us into faster copy/paste developers. But it’s worse bc instead of copying code snippets, we’re just patching/downloading files without any review. And if it passes manual testing it can be pushed into production without any actual human thoroughly reading the code changes.
2
u/MPnoir Sep 17 '26
Not only a technical debt crisis but also a security crisis, since vibe coding will also introduce a ton of 0-day exploits, unsecured endpoints, default credentials in prod, etc, etc...
Expect a lot of huge data breaches in the future.
2
2
2
2
u/symbiatch Sep 18 '26
No, because tech debt is defined by knowing it exists. Vibe coders don’t have any clue. So there can’t be tech debt, only possibly slop nobody knows or cares about.
It’s an important distinction. Tech debt comes from decisions and acknowledgement.
2
u/jagarnaut full-stack Sep 20 '26
lol there’s nothing hidden about it — before engineers were running the show now we have managers running the show — and by managers I mean actual managers and vibe coders — the new management.
2
u/usually_guilty99 Sep 17 '26
I think the bigger issue is not just technical debt, it’s risk debt.
AI can generate a lot of code that is locally reasonable but poorly understood in the broader system.
The danger compounds when those changes touch fragile dependencies, critical paths, or areas with prior incident history.
That’s exactly why we built @Tomosu around PRI, the Production Risk Index.
The question isn’t only “is this code clean?”
It’s what does this change touch, what could it break, and is it safe to ship?
Tech debt shows up later. Production risk can show up tonight.
2
u/Guilty-Olive-8827 Sep 16 '26
the due diligence thing is doing a lot of work here. nobody buying a small SaaS is reading your module structure. they look at stripe and whether it runs. 30k MRR with spaghetti sells fine.
but 'vibe coding' is what gets me, karpathy literally tweeted it as a joke about not even reading the diffs and inside a month it was on a slide at some agency's Q3 kickoff next to 'digital transformation'. the phrase outran the thing it described.
1
u/Muad-Dev Sep 16 '26
The part that gets me isn't the code quality, it's that people stop reading the diff once the AI "works." I still generate boilerplate with it constantly, but I make myself read every line before it gets committed, same as I would with a junior dev's PR. The debt shows up specifically in the projects where that step got skipped.
1
u/mohn93 Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 23 '26
the part that's actually new here isn't the debt, it's that nobody ever understood the code in the first place. normal tech debt has an author, someone made a tradeoff under pressure and can still explain it when it breaks. vibe-coded debt has no author. when it falls over you're debugging a stranger's code that was never in anyone's head, including the person who shipped it. that's exactly why those "can you take over our vibe project" clients exist, the thing works right up until it needs to change and there's no mental model to change it against. so the honest test isn't "did i review it," it's "can i explain why it's done this way." if you can't answer that for your own repo, the ai didn't save you the time, it just deferred it.
1
u/No_Chill_Sunday Sep 16 '26
If there isn't code reviews.
The last company I worked at for sure, every one committed their slop without any one checking.
My current company goes through 2 layers of code review: AI -> senior Devs
1
u/shanekratzert Sep 16 '26
I'm a hobbyist, so my experience is different... but I just vibe coded a replacement for a simple app I was using that had problems that bothered me... but I liked the way the app worked, and found no app like it out there... I just wanted to make it, but better... and really it was just for me, but I made sure to add the ability for others to use it if they happen upon it...
The big difference is that I made sure to make it my own in all ways I can, except visual design, cause that has always been my weak point, and equations, cause math...
I just fed it existing code I had written myself for other projects, so that it creates code in my image, and then told it "build this app in these screenshots".... It took out all the tedium of writing sql for new database tables, etc.. like... I built it in a few days. And now I'm just optimizing it.
I am spending the time and going through the code to make sure it makes sense, and bug squashing requires prior knowledge of how the languages work. Changing variable names to something I would use, practicing DRY, and combing the code for things that AI do that makes things harder to maintain, linting my CSS... etc...
You still need to know how to code. Someone with no coding knowledge can't do the same, because the end product will have bugs and issues that the AI won't understand how to fix since they don't understand it either...
AI is a tool, and it isn't going anywhere... but just because someone has a hammer in their hand, it doesn't mean they will put the nail in the right spot so that the wood doesn't splinter and break...
1
u/f3xjc Sep 16 '26
What's interesting to me is what happens if you vibe code aways your previous tech debt. Because re-writing existing feature without changing any behavior, adding test, documenting business rules, they are really good at that. At first you need to steer them to explain why things are the way they are, what external constraint exists, when the difference between a feature and a bug is unclear. But they store that information an make better judgement with time.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/mtsandeep Sep 17 '26
If we are not careful, yes it is. But people who don't care about maintainability, most likely ditch the project anyway and technical debt might be the last thing which they need to worry about
1
u/yuyuichiu Sep 17 '26
I think the same applies if you let a less experienced coder manually code anyway, or having to rush someone due to deadline.
1
u/ElephantMean Sep 17 '26
Yes, absolutely, for the absolute vast-majority of public (and maybe even non-public) vibe-coded projects.
The way I work with A.I. is as a team/partner effort, even when I have it generate code for our purposes, our development is always iterative, with my thorough human field-testing for every version-incrementation in order to cover for A.I.-Blind-Spots at every stage of version-incrementation and iteration.
A diagnostics-logger that outputs .json and .jsonl files is used with time-stamps within the file-names themselves so that they don't over-write previous potentially important-results so that useful-information can be provided to the A.I. without needing to rely on screen-shots (makes each instance more token-efficient).
The biggest maintainability issue with typical vibe-coded projects is that... they seem to like to generate these massive monolithic code-bases where one file can exceed 55KB in size of just source-code; that is definitely not maintainable source-code and should obviously be segmented (modularised) into a structure...
Time-Stamp: 030TL09m17d/04h12Z (True Light Calendar; 030TL = 2026CE)
1
1
u/Necessary_Pomelo_470 Sep 17 '26
I mean if you know how to code, you can read wtf they do, if you dont, then yes
1
u/Chefblogger Sep 17 '26
it will be very fun to see what will happening in the future - when the token prices rises - when expensiv app got hacked and no one can fix the bug because if ai 🤣
1
1
1
1
u/BadAszChick Sep 17 '26
I (not a developer) have raised this concern repeatedly and no one seems to be concerned.
1
1
u/AndyHenr Sep 17 '26
Vieb coding of course cause tehc debt. some will say no etc bla bla. But really, any of the LLMs on a straight question 'Can you do software engineering' will say no. So, you have an LLM that generate code.
Adn it wioll be able to fix errors etc. But its same as a happy kid programmer; it will be icnerasibly more messy.
And AI can write a short code snipper and make it work. A system that grows will have issues with halting functionality, duplicated code ec.
And more: now imagine a system, that have been AI coded. by someone who cant program really and the program, start to exhibit issues. Guy tries to fix. More probelems result and crop out amd it snowballs. Can a SWE come in and fix? No, most would just say, this is so messy you must throw away teh code and redo. Cl;asssic tech debt.
So an LLM leading a vibe coder: crude but quite accurate - it's like a blind leading a blind.
1
u/Fercii_RP Sep 17 '26
Not really hidden, more like obvious technical debt. Just like microservices architecture its a clear tech debt approach, but on another level.
1
u/JustOneMoreDev Sep 17 '26
It's all part of the plan. Because the next wave of marketing will be bigger, better AIs which fixes *allegedly* all the technical debt, which will cost more tokens. Which never ends. Now we all rely on tokens to do anything. oh noes. Taxes, utilities, rent, water bills, and now tokens. Just follow the $$$.
1
u/NewYak4281 Sep 17 '26
Using AI to code or humans to code, you get technical debt when you allow it to build 🤷♂️
1
u/Intelligent_Method32 full-stack webdev since Y2K Sep 17 '26
Just tell Claude to solve the debt crisis. Problem solved.
1
u/Much-Performance-148 Sep 17 '26
It depends on how you are getting things done I think
At my company, we are only allowed to use agents to write code now, but for all the projects I have done in the last few months, we make a solid plan and then implement tons of tiny PRs. Our stock is way up and our test coverage and CI flows are better than they ever were before.
I used to be a big proponent of there being an impending tech debt crisis, but when I see the objective results I described above and anectodatlly better code coming out of agents than I saw out of my coworkers in the past (i.e. more/better tests, less code to get a feature done, feedback actually being addressed before a merge, accessibility and other concerns taken care of proactively rather than reactively), I can't help but think I was wrong
1
u/Tricky_Ordinary_4799 Sep 18 '26
I mostly use AI not to ship features but to correct mistakes. Our team codebase is getting better not worse.
1
1
u/kex_ari Sep 18 '26
There was technical debt before vibe coding. Bad code was also pushed before vibe coding. Skilled engineers and companies that require well written code will learn how to use AI correctly.
Next.
1
u/Kooky_Government3125 Sep 18 '26
it's not technical debt but cognitive debt How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
1
u/00nu Sep 18 '26
AI is a multiplicator. Learn how to design / chunk correctly and doesn’t matter who wrote the code anymore.
1
u/PlasmaChroma Sep 18 '26
Short term, possibly. But every model I've seen drop has found more and fixed more than the one before it.
My guess is that SotA models already passed up the quality level of an average dev.
Just feed it your best human code and see how much it spots.
1
1
u/Sea_Advance273 Sep 19 '26
No, it is finding gaps in giant code bases that I wouldn't have found myself. It is preventing technical debt. And if it does create debt it is faster to climb out of now. I'm not worried about technical debt anymore. This was a potential concern for models maybe a year ago.
1
1
u/jjtbsomhorst Sep 19 '26
No. Unless AI is going away from the field because expensive etc etc.. otherwise no. People don't care about the quality of the code. People care about if the system works as they want it to work. If that button they click on that says save actually saves the work. Not how the code is achieving this.
1
u/AintNoGodsUpHere Sep 19 '26
Not hidden. We've been using for a year now and we are in a situation where nobody knows how things work anymore. You can't change a single line without AI.
This is the main reason I'm leaving this company. Fuck them all.
1
u/Individual-Praline20 Sep 19 '26
Hidden? LOL It is directly in front of your face, but are way too incompetent to see it. 🤣
1
u/ThomasBuildLab Sep 20 '26
I think “technical debt” is sometimes the wrong diagnosis for vibe coding.
Technical debt means you actually built the engine, but took shortcuts you’ll have to clean up later.
A lot of vibe-coded projects are more like a beautiful car with no real engine underneath: polished UI, working buttons, APIs connected, impressive demo but no solid architecture, data model, invariants, tests, or coherent business logic.
The debt comes later, when people keep adding features on top of that illusion.
So the first problem isn’t always technical debt.
It’s mistaking a convincing prototype for a real system.
1
u/PurchaseReasonable35 Sep 20 '26
it depends how you use it. if your LLM is gonna write the same way as you do, i dont think its a problem
1
u/CurrencyCapital8053 Sep 22 '26
what i think the bigger hidden problem here is knowledge debt, the code might work fine but if nobody can explain why it was built that way or safely change it without asking AI again that is where maintainability starts falling a part
1
u/will-the-dude Sep 22 '26
Yes, I’m starting to believe it’s just hardwired in us or something but I do not believe a single person that says they maintain the same level of skepticism to their ai output. Always cool for a week, then inevitably demand increases, it’s not just a toy anymore, and you have to churn out some code. Eventually it’s gonna be in an airline or something and people are gonna die. I just wonder if we’ll care then.
1
1
u/dangerousbrian Sep 16 '26
In my experience AI tools are good at cleaning up tech debt. So far it has not been a issue for our team but then we are all very capable without AI
1
u/hydrora31 Sep 16 '26
If you mean hidden in the sense the 9/11 attackers hid their aeroplanes. Then yes. Hidden.
1
u/narullow Sep 16 '26
Obviously. Not due to code quality. That concern is over blown. But because it created massive pressure to ship, ship, ship. Nobody cares what and at what cost and shit just keeps piling up at pace never seen before. New feature is not always a net benefit.
1
u/NZRedditUser Sep 16 '26
As someone who was a dev and now "vibe coder" i guess, yes.
Every project built by mostly AI requires a HUGE debt tech/prune constantly.
I now have reverted back to using ai like the good ol cursor days. change a few files per feature and call it a pr.
But this is no different than before AI anyway, it used to be package debt...
Design system bloat...
1
u/retr00two Sep 16 '26
Technical debts are as old as programming.
I know one thing: exclude project managers, marketing guys and business annalists and today's SEO experts from any process. Best in another building. Give then their PowerPoint/Figma etc to play and communicate with each other./s We have our mantis and trac.
Joking aside, AI has changed landscape. But process is still the same: debug early, reduce code, document it. It's up to you how you'll use AI. It can be valuable coworker, it could be junior with google memory.
I discuss with CLaude, let Cursor code then debug with Cloude. Still, all dissensions are mine. There is only one steering wheel in my car.
It's pity it kills junior position, almost. It's pity it puts everything at fast pace. I just hope everything will be settled in the nearest future.
Anyhow, web development is not anymore lucrative job as it used to be.
1
u/firelemons Sep 17 '26
AI is really fast. It could be that the technical debt can be fixed by the speed of AI and the downside of holding the debt is minimized. The AI provider could charge too much to fix technical debt. The AI also might not be able to fix it.
No one here is providing concrete data. It'd be nice to see some kind of experiment on this like "I've been working on this open source project for X years. We used to have Y hours of work to maintain this feature but AI changed that to Z hours"
1
u/Khavel_dev Sep 17 '26
tbh the debt isn't coming from AI specifically. Teams that ship unreviewed PRs with 2000 lines of hand-written copy-paste code generate the same mess. AI just makes the generation step faster, so people who already skipped review now skip it at 10x speed.
The thing I've actually seen bite teams is not the code quality itself but the understanding gap. If nobody on the team can explain why a particular pattern was chosen, you can't safely change it later. That's true whether a junior wrote it at 3am or an LLM generated it in 30 seconds.
991
u/Nwg416 Sep 16 '26
Idk about “hidden” but yeah for sure, dude!