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I don't agree and in my experience the rot happens way faster in handcrafted codebases with constant requirement ratcheting. You resort to shortcuts and code duplication to avoid breaking existing things. This is just the reality when you work under stress in a growing company. AI is much better at keeping up without deteriorating it.

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I tend to agree. Taking shortcuts are one thing, not daring to refactor along the way another. I would only do this in low stress situations due to the risk of producing new bugs or issues, and just lacking the time to properly update tests etc. Opus 4.7 sometimes makes suboptimal design decisions, especially in terms of overcomplicating things, but I have not seen it produce an actual bug in smaller changes in a long while.

The other is using Agents as critical reviewers. I've let Opus 4.7 review PRs by very senior people. Most of the suggestions are meh, but usually there's at least 1 or 2 that improve the code base unequivocally.

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