AI doesn’t really create so-called technical debt or unmaintainable code. The real reason is that people want the speed and ease of vibecoding, while also feeling embarrassed to accept the low technical content and trust anxiety that come with using AI to write code.
There are a lot of people online saying things like: AI is creating massive technical debt. A lot of code written by AI becomes unreadable to programmers later, so it can’t be maintained. We need to reduce the coverage of vibe coding, and any code written by AI must be reviewed and advised on by humans. This kind of argument is really just people failing to adapt to vibe coding as a new way of working.
Next, I’ll organize these directions and details through several personal observations, including: technical anxiety, trust crisis, cost control, LLM-native characteristics, and the fundamental difference between humans and AI.
Technical Anxiety
This is one of the biggest headaches for many developers, especially senior developers: “AI writes code faster than me, and the quality is better.” “AI costs less than me, and knows more than me.” “Even though I’m the one operating AI, I know I’m only saying yes or no, and sometimes I can’t even understand the code AI writes.”
These are all questions that developers think about now, whether they’re frontend, backend, senior, or junior. The common, non-wrong answers are: humans have decision-making power, human experience can guide AI, and humans need to take responsibility. These are all true in some sense, but none of them are the most important point.
Technical anxiety comes from the fact that AI is replacing the value of technical skill, while people’s own sense of where their value comes from hasn’t shifted along with it.
The value a person sells at work is fundamentally that they solve problems for the company: as an individual, or as part of a team, they provide solutions for a certain goal. Early programmers were doing exactly this. Bosses or teams needed someone who understood computers and programming to describe a designed process in the language of computers, and to keep it running as normally as possible.
Now AI has taken over this part of the work. More accurately, AI is a tool handed to the programmers who are closest to programming. The key value was never how advanced your technical skill is, or how elegant your code is. It is whether you can use existing tools to solve the problems in front of you. This is true for the vast majority of programmers, though of course it excludes top open-source developers or experts (I imagine they wouldn’t have this kind of anxiety anyway).
So for technical anxiety, the fix is to rethink where your value comes from: solving the problems in front of you.