In many ways, this excellent article by Kaustubh Saini for Final Round AI’s blog is a cousin to my essay on the design talent crisis. But it’s about what happens when people “become” developers and only know vibe coding.
The appeal is obvious, especially for newcomers facing a brutal job market. Why spend years learning complex programming languages when you can just describe what you want in plain English? The promise sounds amazing: no technical knowledge required, just explain your vision and watch the AI build it.
In other words, these folks don’t understand the code and, well, bad things can happen.
The most documented failure involves an indie developer who built a SaaS product entirely through vibe coding. Initially celebrating on social media that his "saas was built with Cursor, zero hand written code," the story quickly turned dark.
Within weeks, disaster struck. The developer reported that "random things are happening, maxed out usage on api keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random shit on db." Being non-technical, he couldn't debug the security breaches or understand what was going wrong. The application was eventually shut down permanently after he admitted "Cursor keeps breaking other parts of the code."
This failure illustrates the core problem with vibe coding: it produces developers who can generate code but can't understand, debug, or maintain it. When AI-generated code breaks, these developers are helpless.
I don’t foresee something this disastrous with design. I mean, a newbie designer wielding an AI-enabled Canva or Figma can’t tank a business alone because the client will have eyes on it and won’t let through something that doesn’t work. It could be a design atrocity, but it’ll likely be fine.
This can happen to a designer using vibe coding tools, however. Full disclosure: I’m one of them. This site is partially vibe-coded. My Severance fan project is entirely vibe-coded.
But back to the idea of a talent crisis. In the developer world, it’s already happening:
The fundamental problem is that vibe coding creates what experts call "pseudo-developers." These are people who can generate code but can't understand, debug, or maintain it. When AI-generated code breaks, these developers are helpless.
In other words, they don’t have the skills necessary to be developers because they can’t do the basics. They can’t debug, don’t understand architecture, have no code review skills, and basically have no fundamental knowledge of what it means to be a programmer. “They miss the foundation that allows developers to adapt to new technologies, understand trade-offs, and make architectural decisions.”
Again, assuming our junior designers have the requisite fundamental design skills, not having spent time developing their craft and strategic skills through experience will be detrimental to them and any org that hires them.

How AI Vibe Coding Is Destroying Junior Developers' Careers
New research shows developers think AI makes them 20% faster but are actually 19% slower. Vibe coding is creating unemployable pseudo-developers who can't debug or maintain code.