19 Oct 2026 | 0 Comments
The hope is that AI will finally help us clear technical debt. We argue it’s closer to the opposite — the fastest debt-generator we’ve ever built — and look at the new, harder-to-pay kind of debt nobody understood in the first place.Written by James Studdart. Voiced using an AI model of his voice. How this show is made.
Surely AI can finally help us clean up all that neglected legacy code? In this episode we make the uncomfortable case that, left to default incentives, AI is the fastest technical-debt generator we’ve ever built.
We get into why debt was never about the speed of writing code but about writing it faster than we understood it — and how AI is brilliant at exactly that. Worse, it produces a new kind of debt: code nobody ever reasoned about, with no mental model to fall back on when it breaks.
We look at why the early numbers look fantastic and the bill arrives a year later, and why debt-clearing runs at human speed while debt-creation runs at machine speed. Then we talk about treating AI output as a draft, not a delivery.
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