Dont stress the spaghetti code in your vibe coded app

Everyone warns you about the spaghetti code your AI agent churns out. They're worried about the wrong thing. Bad code is now cheap to refactor. The real trap is the tangle of SaaS and PaaS services your vibe coded app sits on, and that mess is brutal to undo.

Don't stress the spaghetti code in your AI / Vibe Coded app.

Many people will caution you about the perils of spaghetti code that is generated by AI coding agents like Claude Code or Codex. It is a very real concern, because without enough oversight, AI can generate some terrible junk.

The application code becomes so tangled and convoluted, nobody could read it and understand what the hell is going on. That includes the AI. This makes managing changes or adding new features a nightmare.

However, this is not the big concern it used to be.

The biggest issue with garbage code, was the cost in dollars. Slowing down developers increases costs, as they get paid by the day. Bugs impact customers and sales. Cleaning up bad code takes a lot of time, and that costs even more money.

AI, changes that a lot. Now you can refactor bad code rapidly at very little cost.

The biggest risk now, is spaghetti infrastructure. A lot of vibe coded products are built on SaaS and PaaS platforms and integrate to lots of different third parties to deliver capability. Hosting, Databases, Authentication, third-party API's, AI providers. These services provide instant-on solutions for your project/product, but they hold hidden costs and risks.

• They are often difficult to leave These services can be impossible or extremely difficult to move away from. They are fundamental building blocks in your app, and finding an alternative that is an exact match is very hard. Moving often means you have to abandon your data.

• Every integration is a risk Any service can fail, and the more of these integrations you have, the higher your risk. If one goes down for hours/days, your product also goes down.

• Cybersecurity becomes extremely messy You need to deal with cybersecurity between each of the integrations. Each service may well be very secure, but it's easy to link them up insecurely. You'll also have to manage all these credentials in your development environments and computers, which is far harder than you think.

• Cost can scale in unexpected ways SaaS/PaaS nearly always have scaling cost models. Becoming successful, can result in your account bumping up into higher billing tiers, that you may not be able to afford.

Unlike spaghetti code, bad infrastructure is very difficult and expensive to fix. Migrating to new providers, often means outages, data loss, new bugs and a whole lot of risk.

If you have limited time to invest in mitigating your risks, don't stress the code, focus on the infrastructure.