Vibe Coding Is Real, and It's Creating Devs Who Can't Debug

There's a certain kind of pull request I keep seeing. The code works. Tests pass. The author can explain what it does in plain English. But ask them why a specific line is there, or what happens when the edge case hits, and you get the thousand-yard stare. They didn't write it. They described it to an AI, accepted the output, nudged it until CI went green, and shipped it. This is vibe coding. And it's everywhere now. What's Actually Happening Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Claude Code — pick your tool. The pitch is the same: describe what you want, the AI builds it, you move fast. It's genuinely impressive. I've watched engineers scaffold full CRUD APIs in twenty minutes. Things that would've taken an afternoon two years ago. But there's a tax that nobody's accounting for. When you write code yourself — even bad code — you build a mental model. You know where the bodies are buried. You made the tradeoff between the clean solution and the pragmatic one. That knowledge is load-bearing