In my book, Swimming in Tech Debt, I write that I don’t think we (engineers) should be explaining tech debt to our non-engineering peers. But that only applies to our tech debt (because it’s boring). Now that they are vibe coding, I do want them to understand their own.

(If you are reading this in August 2025, my book is probably still at its pre-sale price of $0.99.)

I talk to a lot of vibe coders who are running into the problems caused by tech debt in their projects. They don’t and can’t read code, so my definition of tech debt is hard to convey to them. But, I’ve come up with an analogy that I think works.

Imagine that I “vibe design” a concert poster. I go to DALL-E, give it a prompt and it generates an image for me. I look at it and think it’s 80% of the way there, but I want to make changes. So, I prompt again with more details and it gets closer. I try again, and again, and again, but as I go on, I start to see that some of the things that were right in early versions are gone now. I think to myself, maybe I should take the best version and try to fix it myself in a design tool.

But, then I run into a problem. DALL-E generated pixels, not a design file. It doesn’t have layers. It’s not even using fonts and text components. I just want to rotate a background shape a few degrees and fix a typo, but that’s not possible. Or what if instead of an InDesign file, it can only generate PageMaker files. They are organized perfectly, but in an older technology that I can’t use.

Changes that should be easy are hard (or impossible). Choices that were sane don’t make sense today. All of those aspects of this digital file that are hard to change are very similar to what coders experience with tech debt. It only matters if you want to make changes. It’s the resistance you feel when you try.

The irony is that the same things that made it hard for us is making it hard for the AI too. I can’t tell it to rotate a red triangle in the background because there is not triangle there, just a bunch of pixels. It can’t fix the typo because there aren’t any letters. If it had generated a sane representation, we wouldn’t need to look at because it might have been able to change it for us.