A warning about a looming technical debt crisis driven by AI-assisted development. The argument draws a parallel to the subprime mortgage crisis: as agentic coding tools make it faster and cheaper to ship features, teams are incentivized to defer paying back technical debt, expecting future AI models to handle it. But model capability gains will eventually plateau, leaving behind codebases so complex that neither humans nor AI can reason about them. The cycle of rushing features while deferring cleanup is rational in the short term but unsustainable at scale.
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