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> 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.

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