The economics are compelling. Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. The specialists who can efficiently refactor AI messes command $200-400/hour rates. Some are building productized services: fixed-price cleanup packages, AI code audits, and “vibe-to-production” pipelines.
This quote from the Donado Labs blog made me think about when I used to work at a web agency. We did everything in-house: design, hosting, even our own CMS. PHP powered our stack, but we avoided WordPress at all costs. Clients wanted it because it seemed easy and magical to them (and competitors pitched WordPress as their CMS). We wouldn’t touch it back then. It was tricky to customize and a pain to maintain and upgrade.
The harsh reality nobody wants to admit: most AI-generated code is production-unready, and companies are desperately hiring specialists to fix it before their technical debt spirals out of control.
Flash forward more than a decade, and that shop now only builds WordPress web apps and sites. Why? Because they found they could ship so much faster, and that speed made up for the time spent dealing with WordPress quirks and maintenance.
I feel like Vibe Coding is in the same story right now. There’s a safe-ish way to move fast and not break too much, since you’ve got companies that can clean up the mess later, and it’s still cost-effective.
We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how software gets built. AI handles the initial implementation, humans handle architecture, testing, and cleanup. It’s not the future we expected, but it’s the one we’re getting. (…) Junior developers who master Vibe Coding cleanup can command senior salaries within two years. Senior engineers who understand both AI capabilities and limitations become invaluable.