Summary: AI makes building nearly free, so users grow agentic systems piecemeal into fragile messes they no longer understand.
Building systems for working with AI agents is software engineering, whether or not the builder knows it. And increasingly the builders aren’t engineers: a growing crowd of vibe architects with little technical background are crafting complex systems that rely on large context libraries to help them in their daily work. In a recent study of these users, we recognized a familiar pattern that has plagued software architects for decades.
Software engineers learned long ago that systems patched together to meet today’s needs turn fragile and unmaintainable. They learned to plan their architecture so that changing a system later wouldn’t cost more time, money, and expertise than they had. AI makes all these resources feel unlimited, and we saw the result: with nothing forcing them to prioritize, these vibe architects were building big balls of mud . In the AI era, a big ball of mud works surprisingly well — until accumulated complexity makes the system difficult to direct, diagnose, or reconstruct.
What Is a Big Ball of Mud?A big ball of mud is a system scraped together for short-term functionality, not architected for long-term durability.
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