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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

> more economically efficient

I suspect we'll find that the amount of technical debt and loss of institutional knowledge incured by misuse of these tools was initially underappreciated.

I don't doubt that the industry will be transformed, but that doesn't mean that these tools are a panacea.

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I read about AI assistants allegedly creating tech debt but my experience is opposite. Claude Code makes it easy to refactor helping to reduce tech debt. Tech debt usually happens because refactoring takes time but is hard to justify to upper management because upper management only sees new features but not quality of code. With Claude Code refactoring is much faster so it gets done.

Are you talking about refactoring code you’re already familiar with? Or a completely unknown codebase that no one else at the company knows anything about and you’ve been tasked with fixing?

Both. But I'm not talking about fixing. I'm talking about refactoring.

It’s often the case that in order to fix an issue you need to refactor first.

I would argue that you should only allow Claude to refactor code that you understand. Once that institutional knowledge is lost you would then have to regain it before you can safely refactor it, even with Claude's help.

I also specifically used the term "misuse" to significantly weaken my claim. I mean only to say that the risks and downsides are often poorly understood, not that there are no good uses.

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