> But if claude can reliably reorganize code, fix patterns, and write working migrations for state when prompted to do so, it seems like the entire way to reason about tech debt has changed.

Yup, I recently spent 4 days using Claude to clean up a tool that's been in production for over 7 years. (There's only about 3 months of engineering time spent on it in those years.)

We've known what the tool needed for many years, but ugh, the actual work was fairly messy and it was never a priority. I reviewed all of Opus's cleanup work carefully and I'm quite content with the result. Maybe even "enthusiastic" would be accurate.

So even if Claude can't clean up all the tech debt in a totally unsupervised fashion, it can still help address some kinds of tech debt extremely rapidly.