At agentic coding velocity, tech debt becomes obvious much more quickly. Empirical evidence is a bit of a ridiculous bar to hold for software development - we are as quantitatively blind now as we have ever been - but at least for me the anecdotal evidence is very clear. Today's agents hill-climb and their software architecture is pretty reliably bad without a human in the loop.

And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.

When I said "in my experience" I meant literally that, my experience so far. I'm not making any predictions. I'm definitely anticipating things improving at a rapid pace, which is why I think it's good to run frequent experiments. If in a month I find that an agent can one-shot a 20k line project without creating an unreadable, unmaintainable mess, that will be great.