They want mediocre developers...

A critical take on 'comprehension debt' — the growing gap between the volume of AI-generated code in a system and how much of it developers actually understand. Drawing on a study showing AI-assisted developers performed worse at debugging, and the 2024 DORA report showing higher throughput but increased delivery instability, the argument is that AI coding tools are accelerating code production faster than teams can meaningfully review or comprehend it. The concern extends to a long-term lock-in scenario: AI labs are subsidizing low prices during a customer acquisition phase, and as developers lose critical thinking and debugging skills through over-delegation, they become dependent on tools whose prices could rise dramatically. The post also critiques the incentive structure of AI labs profiting from token consumption regardless of code quality.