Absolutely. I really don't think the future will be humans reading and picking apart an AI-generated codebase, there will be tech debt agents or whatever running overnight.

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SlinkyOnStairs 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you misunderstand why tech debt lingers around. It's not a capacity or capability problem.

Organisations 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.

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james_marks 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

But 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.

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pu_pe 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	SlinkyOnStairs 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt. Yes. In practice, this does not weigh against organisational resistance. AI really makes it worse by adding an explicit numerical cost to doing anything.

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bigstrat2003 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.