The part about "dark flow" resonates strongly. I've seen this pattern play out with a specific downstream cost that doesn't get discussed enough: maintenance debt.
When someone vibe-codes a project, they typically pin whatever dependency versions the LLM happened to know about during training. Six months later, those pinned versions have known CVEs, are approaching end-of-life, or have breaking changes queued up. The person who built it doesn't understand the dependency tree because they never chose those dependencies deliberately — the LLM did. Now upgrading is harder than building from scratch because nobody understands why specific libraries were chosen or what assumptions the code makes about their behavior.
This is already happening at scale. I work on tooling that tracks version health across ecosystems and the pattern is unmistakable: projects with high AI-generation signals (cookie-cutter structure, inconsistent coding style within the same file, dependencies that were trendy 6 months ago but have since been superseded) correlate strongly with stale dependency trees and unpatched vulnerabilities.
The "flow" part makes it worse — the developer feels productive because they shipped features fast. But they're building on a foundation they can't maintain, and the real cost shows up on a delay. It's technical debt with an unusually long fuse.
When someone vibe-codes a project, they typically pin whatever dependency versions the LLM happened to know about during training. Six months later, those pinned versions have known CVEs, are approaching end-of-life, or have breaking changes queued up. The person who built it doesn't understand the dependency tree because they never chose those dependencies deliberately — the LLM did. Now upgrading is harder than building from scratch because nobody understands why specific libraries were chosen or what assumptions the code makes about their behavior.
This is already happening at scale. I work on tooling that tracks version health across ecosystems and the pattern is unmistakable: projects with high AI-generation signals (cookie-cutter structure, inconsistent coding style within the same file, dependencies that were trendy 6 months ago but have since been superseded) correlate strongly with stale dependency trees and unpatched vulnerabilities.
The "flow" part makes it worse — the developer feels productive because they shipped features fast. But they're building on a foundation they can't maintain, and the real cost shows up on a delay. It's technical debt with an unusually long fuse.