Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. The use of technical debt is a bit “funny” in that they’re using it to refer to a deficit of software, whereas it’s more commonly used to refer to less-than-ideal code that will need to be fixed later.

For that reason, I could see AI-generated code leading to more tech debt since its output is, as the authors put it, “cheap enough to waste”. People might get the idea to just have it crank out AI code snippets with no real bearing on what they actually do or no real care to refactor said snippets for reuse / readability until their house of cards collapses.