Does vibecoding make technical debt harder to spot early on?
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Building fast feels great until something breaks and you realize you don't actually know how the underlying system works.
Asking if you could rebuild it yourself is a solid sanity check before sinking more time into a feature.
I usually treat AI code as a quick proof of concept and then re-read every generated line before moving it into a core branch.
Have you ever had to completely throw away a working AI prototype just because the code was too messy to scale?
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I have not thrown one away, mostly because I gave the agent a skeleton to copy before it wrote anything. My app was built on the architecture of an earlier project of mine: same layers, same screen pattern, same backend shape. The agent fills in a structure it did not invent, so the mess stays local. The debt I do see is quieter than messy code: leftovers. My translation files still carry strings from the old project's photo features, and one pricing file still has its price table. Nothing breaks, so nobody notices. What helps is a written list of these leftovers in the project notes, so the agent prunes them when it touches that area instead of building on top of them.