Are we vibe coding our way to a new legacy crisis?

AI may be creating tomorrow's technical debt

by · TechRadar

Opinion By Gregg Aldana Published 5 August 2026

(Image credit: Shutterstock/SomYuZu)

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When Anthropic's CFO revealed that over 90 per cent of the company's code is now written by its own AI, it landed as a milestone.

Tasks that once consumed hours now take 30 minutes. The productivity gains are significant.

But Anthropic is an AI-native company with some of the world's best engineering talent.

Latest Videos FromTechRadarWatch full video here: Gregg Aldana

Vice President and Head of Global Solutions Consulting at Appian.

For most enterprises, the question isn't whether AI can generate code at that speed. It's whether they can govern what it generates.

Shadow AI: The new shadow IT

"Vibe coding", the term for generating code via AI, has moved into the mainstream. By some estimates, almost half of all new global code is now AI-generated. Developer productivity is up. So is debt that nobody fully understands.

Part of what's driving this is necessity. AI is helping close the engineering talent gap. Teams that lack experienced developers are using it to build at the pace the business demands. The problem is that the same shortage that makes AI indispensable also means there aren't enough senior engineers to review AI-generated code.

Research across Fortune 50 enterprises found that AI-assisted developers introduce security vulnerabilities at ten times the rate of their peers. Forty-five per cent of AI-generated code contains OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. Independent analyses indicate that technical debt increases by 30–41 per cent following the adoption of AI tools.

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