You didn’t ship fast. You borrowed against your future team’s sanity.
The speed was real. You shipped in days what used to take a sprint. But the person who joins after you has to take ownership of a codebase they didn’t write, can’t fully read, and are now on the hook for. Every bug is an excavation. Every new feature starts with “wait, why does this work this way?”
That’s not technical debt. That’s organisational debt — and it will land on someone else’s lap, maybe even your first real engineer hire.
The vibe coding pitch is about your velocity. The cost shows up in theirs.
I’ve seen this play out more than once: a founder proud of how fast they moved, and an engineer quietly exhausted by a codebase with no author. Not because the code was bad. Because nobody ever had to understand it — the model just kept going.
If you’re building fast with AI right now, that’s fine. Just be honest about what you’re actually doing. The debt will get paid. The question is whether you’ll still be around when it does, or whether you’ll have handed it to someone who trusted you.