Beyond Vibe Coding: Build Products, Not Technical Debt is the talk Chris Coughlan gave at the NVSBC Vets26 conference, for a room full of veteran-owned government contractors weighing how far to trust AI with the software their businesses run on.
Vibe coding, describing what you want and letting AI build it, is the fastest way to ship software today. It is also the fastest way to accumulate technical debt you cannot see. The talk puts a real cost on that trade through three stories from the field:
- A 12-person firm's founder builds a client portal over a weekend for roughly $200 a month instead of $140,000. Weeks later, one client sees another client's documents. The portal is shut down, a breach notice goes to the entire roster, and years of trust are gone.
- A defense contractor's capture lead quietly vibe-codes a proposal tool that ships CUI to a commercial AI API. Nine months later, a Prime audit turns one oversight into four CMMC findings.
- An 80-person GovCon builds a timesheet helper in a week. Six months on it runs half the company's operations, until a Prime audit surfaces hundreds of double-booked hours and four months of bad invoices.
The through-line is the Intent Gap: the distance between what you think your solution does and what it actually does for your users. Technical debt is what fills that gap, the accumulated cost of the decisions you never made on purpose.
The talk closes on the alternative C Infinity builds with every day: AI-enabled, spec-driven development, where the specification is the product and the code follows. Fast and sound, not fast or sound.
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