Vibe coding builds the mess, you still have to live in it

The codebase doesn’t care how it got written, but you will.

Robby Russell wrote a piece that I keep thinking about. His argument: the pros dismissed Access and FileMaker, but founders built real businesses on them. The tools worked. The code did what it needed to do. He’s honest enough to admit this threatens his own consultancy, which makes the take credible. He’s not wrong. But he’s answering a different question than the one I’m worried about.

Robby asks: does it work? Paul Stack asks: does it stay working? These are not the same question, and the gap between them is where teams are going to get hurt.

I am driven by experience here. I have seen codebases that worked, kept working, and then one day stopped working in a way nobody could explain quickly. Not because the code was wrong — it did what it was supposed to do — but because the understanding had evaporated. The people who knew why the system was shaped the way it was had moved on, or forgotten, or were never there to begin with. You’re left with something that runs but that you cannot confidently change. Velocity goes to zero. You hire more people and it gets slower.

Vibe coding accelerates that curve. Not because the AI writes bad code — sometimes it writes better code than I would. But because you can now generate two hundred pull requests worth of decisions without the friction that used to force you to think. Paul Stack’s framing is right: it’s not a hallucination problem, it’s a drift problem. Same ball of mud as always, just assembled faster.

Margaret-Anne Storey at UVic has been writing about cognitive debt, and it is the cleanest term I have seen for what this actually costs. Not technical debt — that’s about the code. Cognitive debt is the gap between a system’s evolving structure and the team’s shared understanding of why it works. The theory of the system lives distributed across people, documentation, tests, conversations, commit messages, slack threads. When you repay cognitive debt, you’re not refactoring — you’re rebuilding all of that. Simon Willison is cited in her piece describing how he gets lost in his own AI-assisted projects. That’s a useful data point. He’s not a junior developer. He’s one of the sharper people thinking about AI right now, and he is losing the thread of his own work.

Velocity outpacing understanding. That’s the cleanest definition I’ve seen for what vibe coding actually costs.

Charity Majors wrote something last year that I keep coming back to: bolting AI onto bad foundations doesn’t fix the foundations. She has been consistent on this. The Honeycomb piece on disposable versus durable code draws the line more explicitly — there is throwaway code and there is infrastructure that has to survive. Most takes treat these as the same thing. They are not. A script that automates one CSV transformation and gets deleted after use does not need architecture. A service that handles payments in three years still does.

The Access/FileMaker analogy works for the founders who shipped fast and won before the complexity caught up with them. It breaks when you need to hand it to someone else, when you need to pass a security audit, when a new hire has to understand what the service actually does on a Tuesday with no context. The codebase didn’t care how it got written. Your new engineer cares. Your incident responder at 2am cares.

Paul Stack’s framing on what this changes — when output is abundant, architecture is the scarce resource — is the part I want people to sit with. We are all going to write more code. The question is what holds it together. Systems thinking matters more now, not less, precisely because the friction that forced you to think before committing has been removed. That friction was doing work you didn’t notice.

I have been doing infrastructure and platform work long enough to remember when moving fast on the wrong foundation felt like winning for a while. It does feel like winning. Then you scale. Then you hire. Then you try to explain to someone why a thing is the way it is and you realize you don’t actually know anymore.

The vibe is fine. Just remember you’re the one who has to live in the house.