I've been researching the usage of Developer tooling at mine and other organizations for years now and I'm genuinely trying to understand where agentic coding fits into the evolving landscape. One of the most solid things im beginning to understand is that many people dont understand how these tools influence technical debt.

Debt doesnt come due immediately, its accrued and may allow for the purchase of things that were once too expensive, but eventually the bill comes due.

Ive started referring to vibe-coding as "Credit Cards" for developers. Allowing them to accrue massive amounts of technical debt that were previously out of reach. This can provide some competent developers with incredible improvments to their work. But for the people who accrue more Technical Debt than they have the ability to pay off, it can sink their project and cost our organization alot in lost investment of both time and money.

I see Gas Town and tools like as debt schemes where someone applies for more credit cards to pay the payments on prior cards they've maxed out, compounding the issue with the vague goal of "eventually it pays off." So color me skeptical.

Not sure if this analogy holds up to all things, but its been helping my organization navigate the application of agents, since it allows us to allocate spend depending on the seniority of each developer. Thus ive been feeling like an underwriter having to figure out if a developer requesting more credits or budget for agentic code can be trusted to pay off the debt they will accrue.