The Prioritization Filter You Lost When You Started Vibe Coding

Before AI coding assistants, implementation cost acted as a natural filter on your backlog. A two-week feature got scrutinized. A two-hour feature often didn't. That asymmetry wasn't inefficiency — it was judgment. Vibe coding removed it. Here's what the data shows, and how to rebuild it deliberately. What the numbers say about dead code The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey found that 66% of developers identify AI solutions that are "almost right but not quite" as their top frustration. More relevantly, 45% say debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming than they expected — often because the code itself shouldn't have been written in the first place. A Fastly study of 791 professional developers (July 2025) found that 28% of developers frequently need to fix or edit AI-generated code enough that it offsets most of the time savings. And the 2025 DORA Report found that only 30% of developers report little or no trust in AI-generated code — meaning the majority are shipping co