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Comment by SlinkyOnStairs | Hacker News Reader

I think you misunderstand why tech debt lingers around. It's not a capacity or capability problem.

Organisations just don't want to deal with the accountability involved with "touching cold code". Whether it's a human or "AI agent" doesn't change the "It worked in prod, you touched it, you broke it, never touch anything again" dynamic.

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That's one dimension of it, but in the context of this thread we are talking about how maintainable a codebase is for other humans. If your codebase is messy you depend on a few key employees and it might be hard to onboard new ones, so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.

> so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.

Yes. In practice, this does not weigh against organisational resistance.

AI really makes it worse by adding an explicit numerical cost to doing anything.

Um, no, actually AI makes it better because the cost is lower now. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, obviously organizations already fight against tech debt all the time through a variety of means?

The point there is that it is MUCH easier to get corporate to agree to something when the cost is nebulous and being paid anyway. If you get a senior dev to clean up some tech debt, how much did that cost the company? The dev will have some multiple things at the same time, so you can't cleanly assign a number of hours, maybe multiple people are involved. It's practically just an unknowable. Practically, $0.

Anthropic will sent a concrete number bill.

Exactly this. When I reject a refactor PR (or ideally, _before_ there's a PR), it's not because it's a bad idea, per se.

But there's risk associated with every change, and it takes time to review, QA, monitor the rollout, communicate to stake holders, etc.

The refactor itself may be the smallest part of it.

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