Vibe Coding Has a Debt Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

I've shipped more code in the last six months than in the previous two years. That should feel like a triumph. Mostly it feels like dread. Vibe coding — the practice of describing what you want and letting an AI write the actual implementation — went from Andrej Karpathy's offhand tweet to industry standard faster than any tooling shift I've seen. Every engineer I know has Cursor, Copilot, or something similar open right now. Entire startups are being built this way. I work on a team of eight developers and we've roughly tripled our output velocity. And we have absolutely no idea what half our codebase does anymore. The Speed Is Real. The Understanding Isn't. Here's what actually happens when you vibe-code a feature: you describe the problem, the AI writes 200 lines, you read enough to confirm it looks right, tests pass, you ship. Fast. Feels good. Then three weeks later there's a bug in that code. You open it and it's... fine? It's structured, it's commented, it handles edge cases you