Seth's Blog : Technical debt and AI slop

Technical debt and AI slop

Technical debt is easy to incur. It’s unnecessary added features, undocumented code, support for outmoded interactions and anything that slows down your ability to update and upgrade your work. Tech debt is the combination of doing what feels right at the time, in a hurry, and then having to maintain it and understand it going forward.

Vibe coding, which is a rising trend, pairs a human programmer with an AI like chatGPT. The AI is doing most of what a human used to do, and generating far more lines of code per hour than a person might. The problem is that often, no one knows exactly how the code works, which means it’s going to be difficult to fix when it breaks or needs an upgrade.

And as AI starts to create data sets (by reviewing, for example, response rates to emails or designs), those data sets are going to be so multi-dimensional that only an AI will be able to make sense of them.

The end result will be as the end result often is–the first one now will later be last. The shortcuts might not be the best way to get to where you’re going.

Get the system architecture right first. Document it, streamline it and test it. Then divide the components into small pieces and let AI finish the work. Fixing a defective brick is far more cost effective than re-architecting an entire building.