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What We Lost the Last Time Code Got Cheap
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Technology
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"AI" coding tools can offer some value. The problem is that they often generate tech debt with pay day loan level interest rates. What's made the interest rate so high is that now, not only do you have the actual code base tech debt. You also have a bunch of code that no one understands and the barrier to entry for software engineering has become so high that fewer younger people are actually learning how to be good programmers. Lots of organizations don't give a shit about their rapidly growing mountain of tech debt today but they're sure going to at the end of the week when the payment comes due.
What their "leadership" fails to understand is that any idiot can shell out code. I've seen lots of terrible programmers generate millions of lines of really shitty code that somehow, by the power of the dark Lord himself, manages to compile. That's not what a software engineer actually does though. Software engineers design operational systems with software. Writing code is a secondary function of that. There are currently no AI agents that can successfully design a software system with any degree of complexity because LLM's don't actually understand anything.
I think it's more of a "how you use it" thing, but you're definitely right that AI agents can't design systems properly.
Some people I know have produced way more code, removed tech debt, and all without introducing any bugs since they started using AI. That's because they're not using it to do anything beyond their skillset, understand everything it's doing, and are using it to catch mistakes they otherwise would have made. Other people are using it without reviewing the output, or are using it to try and do things beyond their skillset, and that's how you end up with infinite tech debt and a whole host of bugs.
Personally I've recently started heavily using the AI code review bot we have at our company, both for my own code and other people's. While 50% of what it says is hallucination or wrong, that's not an issue because I know it's wrong or a hallucination so can just tell it no and to focus on other things, like catching bugs or issues that most reviewers would just glance past, and also gives you a rubber duck that talks back.
I couldn't agree more.