Let me preface this by saying I have been writing very exacting code for most of my career to a high standard. But with AI generated code, I’m not sure if all the same value-prop exists that were used to with traditional hand-written code.

For example if AI generates 2x of a utility function that does the same thing, yes that is not an ideal, but is also fairly minor in terms of tech debt. I think as long as all behaviors introduced by new code are comprehensively tested, it becomes less significant that there can be some level of code duplication.

It also is something that can be periodically caught and cleaned up fairly easily by an agent tasked to look for it as part of review and/or regular sessions to reduce tech debt.

A lot of this is adapting to new normal for me, and there is some level of discomfort here. But I think: if I were the director of an engineering org and I learned different teams under me had a number of duplicated utility functions (or even competing services in the same niche), would this bother me? Would it be a priority for me to fix? I think I’d prefer it weren’t so, but probably would not rise to the level of needing specific prioritization unless it impacted velocity and/or stability.

My take is similar.

Majority of the cases, I think this is harmless. In C#, for example, we have agents repeatedly generating switch expressions for file extensions to MIME-type.

This is harmless since there's no business logic.

But we also have some cases where phone number processing gets semi-duplicated. Here, it's a bit more nebulous since it looked like it was isolated, but still had some overlapping logic. What if we change vendors in the future and we need a different format? Have to find all the places it occurs and there's now no single entry point or specific pattern to search for.

Agents themselves may or may not find all the cases since it is using `grep` and doesn't have semantic understanding of the code. What if we ask for it to refactor and its `grep` misses some pattern?

Still uneasy, but yet to feel the pain on this one.

> For example if AI generates 2x of a utility function that does the same thing, yes that is not an ideal, but is also fairly minor in terms of tech debt. I think as long as all behaviors introduced by new code are comprehensively tested, it becomes less significant that there can be some level of code duplication.

We still run into the same issues that this brings about in the first place, AI or no AI. When requirements change will it update both functions? If it is rewriting them because it didn't see it existed in the first place, probably not. And there will likely be slight variations in function / components names, so it wouldn't be a clean grep to make the changes.

It may not impact velocity or stability in the exact moment, but in 6 months or a year - it likely will, the classic trope of tech debt.

I have no solution for this, it's definitely a tricky balance and one that we've been struggling with human written code since the dawn.