Vibe Code at Scale: Managing Technical Debt When AI Writes Most of Your Codebase
· 9 min read
In March 2026, a major e-commerce platform lost 6.3 million orders in a single day — 99% of its U.S. order volume gone. The cause wasn't a rogue deployment or a database failure. An AI coding tool had autonomously generated and deployed code based on outdated internal documentation, corrupting delivery time estimates across every marketplace. The company had mandated that 80% of engineers use the tool weekly. Adoption metrics were green. Engineering discipline was not.
This is what vibe coding at scale actually looks like. Not the fast demos that ship in four days. The 6.3 million orders that vanish on day 365.
