> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases?

Yes!

And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not.

Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure.

I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.