We need to talk about the bill.
Right now, the tech industry is enjoying an all-you-can-eat buffet of free code. You want a landing page? Here is the HTML. You want a Python script to scrape emails? Done in seconds. It feels like we have unlocked a cheat code for productivity.
But as any senior developer will tell you, there is no such thing as free code.
I have started noticing a pattern in recent code reviews and freelance audits. I call it "The Vibe Tax." It is the hidden cost of pasting code that you do not fully understand, and it is about to become the most expensive line item in software development.
The "Frankenstein" Codebase
The problem with AI generation isn't that the code is wrong. Often, it is technically correct. The problem is that AI has zero sense of context.
If you ask ChatGPT to write a function to format a date in three different parts of your app, it might give you three completely different solutions.
- One uses moment.js (which is huge and outdated).
- One uses a custom regex (which is fragile).
- One uses the native Date object (which is quirky).
They all work. The "vibe" is consistent. But your codebase is now a Frankenstein monster of conflicting styles and unnecessary dependencies.
The tax comes due six months later. That is when a developer has to update the date format across the app. Instead of changing it in one place, they have to hunt down three different implementation methods. What should be a five-minute task turns into a two-hour headache.
Bloat is the New Normal
I recently looked at a simple "To-Do" app built by a founder using AI tools. It worked great. But the bundle size was massive.
Why? Because every time the founder got stuck, they asked the AI for a fix, and the AI suggested installing a new library. Need a button? Install a UI kit. Need an icon? Install an icon pack. Need to center a div? Install a layout engine.
The AI optimized for "getting it working now" rather than "keeping it lightweight." The result was a simple app carrying 50MB of dead weight. That is the Vibe Tax. You pay for it in server costs, slow load times, and frustrated users on mobile connections.
The Market Impact: The "MVP" Trap
This is where it affects the market. We are seeing a flood of MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) built entirely via vibe coding.
Investors love them because they are built fast and cheap. But these products often have a technical lifespan of about three months.
When these startups try to hire their first real engineering team to build "Version 2," the engineers take one look at the code and realize it is unsalvageable. There is no architecture. There is no security logic. It is just a loose pile of scripts held together by hope.
The company then has to pause all feature development for months just to rewrite the entire thing. That is a massive tax.
Experience is the Only Audit
This is why I believe the demand for senior engineers is actually going to go up, not down.
Junior developers and non-coders can now generate volume. They can flood a repo with commits. But volume is not value.
Companies are going to realize that while they can get features built for "free" with AI, the cost of maintaining that code is skyrocketing. They will need experienced eyes to look at a generated solution and say, "No, do not use that library," or "That database schema will fail at 1,000 users."
The Vibe Tax is real. And the only way to avoid paying it is to stop treating AI as a magic wand and start treating it like what it actually is: a really fast, really confident intern who needs supervision.
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