alt Hacker News3 pages of reply or overly verbose code, often without abstractions - I read all the posters here and in other forums say that programming has shifted towards reviewing AI output rather than coding said output manually; I agree, however, I just don't buy that everyone is actually reviewing the code as intensely as one would expect - there is a tendency that arrived rather quickly to assume that the AI is correct and efficient. I guess the ultimate reviewer is another AI agent I guess.
I think ultimately you still have to pay down tech debt eventually. Either through bankruptcy (throwaway the project) or servicing the debt (refactoring, rearchitecting etc).
It's not different than when coding by hand, often we take shortcuts by hand that we then have to pay for later. It really just becomes a judgement call on when to stop prompting new features and start service what you have.
I think with AI and vibecoding its tempting to assume the output is good and chase the dopamine hits of more features, more features, more features, but eventually you get stuck.
That being said AI is also a great tool at paying down tech debt. It's great at helping you read a codebase and can be great at making the mechanical changes you want. And I think there is some truth to the story that newer models will be able to pay down debt (fix the slop) of older models. But its all shades of grey, newer models are better than older ones, but can I emit slop with 5.6 faster than 5.7 will be able to fix it in the future? Nobody knows.
It's not like human projects are devoid of bad code, its all tradeoffs and shades of gray. But to be honest I haven't written a line of code by hand in a while.