AI makes tech debt more expensive

It is a self-reinforcing pattern: the easier it is to generate code, the more code is generated. The more code is generated, the bigger the cost of maintenance is (and the relationship is super-linear).

So every time we generate the same boilerplate we really do copy/paste adding to maintenance costs.

We are amazed looking at the code generation capabilities of LLMs forgetting the goal is to have less code - not more.

My experience is the opposite - I find large blobs of generated code to be daunting, so I tend to pretty quickly reject them and either write something smaller by hand, or reprompt (in one way for another) for less, easier to review code.