> The study found "transient velocity increase" followed by "persistent complexity increase."

Companies facing this reality are of course typically going to use AI to help manage the increased complexity. But that leads quickly to AI becoming a crutch, without which even basic maintenance could pose an insurmountable challenge.

The part that gets me is when it passes lint, passes tests, and the logic is technically correct, but it quietly changed how something gets called. Rename a parameter. Wrap a return value in a Promise that wasn't there before. Add some intermediate type nobody asked for. None of that shows up as a failure anywhere. You only notice three days later when some other piece of code that depended on the old shape breaks in a way that has nothing to do with the original change.

>The fix isn't "apply traditional methods"

I would argue they are. Those traditional methods aim at keeping complexity low so that reading code is easier and requires less effort, which accelerates code review.

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