I think you misunderstand why tech debt lingers around. It's not a capacity or capability problem.
replyOrganisations just don't want to deal with the accountability involved with "touching cold code". Whether it's a human or "AI agent" doesn't change the "It worked in prod, you touched it, you broke it, never touch anything again" dynamic.
Exactly this. When I reject a refactor PR (or ideally, _before_ there's a PR), it's not because it's a bad idea, per se.
replyBut there's risk associated with every change, and it takes time to review, QA, monitor the rollout, communicate to stake holders, etc.
The refactor itself may be the smallest part of it.
That's one dimension of it, but in the context of this thread we are talking about how maintainable a codebase is for other humans. If your codebase is messy you depend on a few key employees and it might be hard to onboard new ones, so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.
reply> so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.
replyYes. In practice, this does not weigh against organisational resistance.
AI really makes it worse by adding an explicit numerical cost to doing anything.
So your proposal to handle tech debt created by "AI" being unable to do good engineering is... throw more AI at it? There's a saying about the definition of insanity which comes to mind.
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