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I’ve seen this cycle before: Delphi promised everyone could write programs. Visual website builders “killed” web development. No-code/low-code tools claimed to change everything.

Now it’s 2026, and the hype is Vibe Coding: describe a feature in plain English, and watch hundreds of lines of code appear per minute. No coding, no engineering—just steering a vibe.

It feels magical. But as someone who’s cleaned up after plenty of “miracles,” here’s the catch: technical debt never disappears, it compounds. AI-generated code is a high-interest loan, and most teams are not ready to pay it back.

I'm curious: How is the community handling AI-generated code, velocity without understanding, and the hidden debt?

Cleanup isn't the problem. Clean code doesn't really matter so much anymore, agents can be guided with tools and orchestration to "clean up" bad code: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-14-digital-alchemy-tu...

The bottleneck is validating that the software does everything it says that it does correctly: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-27-stop-orchestrating...

Right now most vibe coders are trying to hype semi-broken software and foist validation on early adopters. This is unsustainable.