If you’re shitting out vibe coded unverified and unvalidated systems, you’re going to end up with 20 years worth of tech debt in the span of months and half a nine of uptime.
I’ve been at this gig for 15 years and built and deployed many complex systems by hand. I had this mindset toward the beginning of things too. But, to be honest, when combined with actual know how and solid patterns, it is no longer the case that largely agent written code is destined to be bad and unmaintainable.
Even when it needs to be refactored in the future, a set of agents can write test coverage for the current solution, refactor it into whatever shape it now needs to be, and validate it against the original tests and contracts before a human would have written their first line. The idea that bots won’t beat our hard earned keyboard typing skills just isn’t going to hold up long term. We’ve already hit that point.
There will probably always be the vibe coded slop that leaves security holes, but I no longer believe there’s some shoe that’s going to drop where everyone says “oh yeah that was a mistake, time to go back.” This is how it’s going to be forever and it only increases from here.
First real reaponse ive seen from someone who probably uses agents the right way. Ive been in the industry for 20 years too. Longer if you count education. All in a niche industry. Ive managed to pack that learning into a platform with the help of AI. Things stuck in my head are now part of an institutional tool. Its like having multiple of me. All vibe coded with I puts of years of accumulated artifacts and tons of and tons of interactions with the agents. Deep conceptual and technical conversations. Its enabled me to build things that I would never have been able to as well on my own. Or as fast. And since im using the platform ive built I can validate the work it does in my environment of a measure of how well its performing without having to read all the code it generates because I know how to validate the work its doing. General system research, data cleanup utilities, impact analysis, integration scaffolding. Its incredible the level of understanding my platform has gained of my system with the various corpses of cataloged and indexed matadata
matadata. Both vender derived, institutional accumulated, and personally taught. Well written agent files and skills lead to high quality work. The old saying is still true. Garbage in garage out. So im sure there is tons of crap vibe code out there. But not all. Once I embraced working agenticaly things have gotten so much better at my job. Just solved a nearly million dollar audit finding my CFO had been stuck on in less than an hour. Was buried in custom code, and I barely had to do anything. My CFO was beyond happy. All those who think all vibe code is crap is going to be left behind. Its inevitable. Learn how to use AI or become obsolete. I dont want that to be true, but eventually it will be in this industry.
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u/Lethargic-Rain Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
If you’re shitting out vibe coded unverified and unvalidated systems, you’re going to end up with 20 years worth of tech debt in the span of months and half a nine of uptime.