We need to talk about Technical Debt in AI Development. Lately, I’ve been seeing a disturbing trend in the WordPress ecosystem: developers and business owners are using LLMs to “vibe code” entire features directly into their functions.php file. It looks like it works, the demo is shiny, but underneath? It’s a house of cards waiting for the first PHP update or API shift to knock it down.
The problem isn’t that AI is bad at writing code; it’s that AI doesn’t understand the 14 years of architectural context your site carries. When you chase speed without standards, you aren’t “shipping fast”—you’re just financing a high-interest loan of technical debt that you’ll eventually have to pay back with a broken checkout or a crashed server.
The “God Function” Smell in AI Code
One of the most common indicators of Technical Debt in AI Development is the “God Function.” You ask an AI to “add a custom field to the WooCommerce checkout and send the data to a third-party CRM,” and it gives you one massive 150-line block of code. It handles the UI, the validation, the data sanitization, the API request, and the error logging all in one place.
In a senior dev’s world, this is a nightmare. It violates the Single Responsibility Principle. If the CRM API changes, your entire checkout might hang because the logic is tightly coupled. I’ve seen sites where a single failed API transient caused a race condition that locked up the database—all because the AI-generated code didn’t account for asynchronous failures.
The “Naive” AI Approach (Building Debt)
Here is what the “vibe coding” approach usually looks like. It’s a mess of hard-coded values and zero extensibility.
<?php
// The "God Function" generated by AI
add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_update_order_meta', function( $order_id ) {
if ( ! empty( $_POST['custom_crm_field'] ) ) {
update_post_meta( $order_id, 'crm_data', sanitize_text_field( $_POST['custom_crm_field'] ) );
// Hard-coded API logic inside a hook - BAD!
$response = wp_remote_post( 'https://api.some-crm.com/v1/lead', [
'body' => json_encode(['email' => $_POST['billing_email'], 'field' => $_POST['custom_crm_field']]),
'headers' => ['Authorization' => 'Bearer 123456789'] // Hard-coded secret!
]);
if ( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
error_log( 'CRM Failed' );
}
}
});Refactoring Technical Debt in AI Development
To fix this, we need to decouple the logic. Use classes, use filters, and for God’s sake, use WordPress Options API or environment variables for your keys. This is how you build a system that can evolve without breaking.
<?php
/**
* A modular approach to handle CRM integrations.
* This separates UI, Storage, and External Communication.
*/
class Bbioon_CRM_Integration {
public function __construct() {
add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_update_order_meta', [ $this, 'store_custom_field' ] );
add_action( 'bbioon_after_order_processed', [ $this, 'sync_to_crm' ], 10, 2 );
}
public function store_custom_field( $order_id ) {
$value = filter_input( INPUT_POST, 'custom_crm_field', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING );
if ( $value ) {
update_post_meta( $order_id, '_bbioon_crm_value', $value );
// Trigger a custom hook to handle the sync asynchronously if possible
do_action( 'bbioon_after_order_processed', $order_id, $value );
}
}
public function sync_to_crm( $order_id, $value ) {
$api_key = get_option( 'bbioon_crm_api_key' ); // Not hard-coded
// Logic for API wrapper goes here...
}
}
new Bbioon_CRM_Integration();Implementing Guardrails: Stop the Bleeding
If you’re going to use AI—and let’s be honest, we all are—you need automated guardrails. You can’t rely on your memory to catch every “hallucination.” I personally use PHP_CodeSniffer with WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) to catch sloppy patterns before they hit production.
Furthermore, as discussed in our post on AI documentation and technical debt, the lack of human-readable context is often what kills a project. If your AI writes the code, but no human can explain why it works, you don’t own that codebase—you’re just renting it from an algorithm.
The Takeaway: Ship Stability, Not Just Speed
Speed is addictive, but in the world of Technical Debt in AI Development, fast is often the precursor to fragile. Don’t let a coding assistant talk you into skipping unit tests or ignoring the WordPress Plugin Handbook. A “God script” that saves you an hour today might cost you a weekend of firefighting next month.
Look, if this Technical Debt in AI Development stuff is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Let’s Clean Up the Mess
Whether you’ve inherited a “vibe coded” nightmare or you’re trying to scale a prototype that has hit its limits, you need senior engineering judgment. It’s time to move past the demo phase and build something that actually lasts. Ship it—but ship it right.
