natemeyvis.com
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ksl
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Nate Meyvis pushes back on the growing alarm around AI-generated code becoming unmaintainable. His argument isn’t that cognitive debt doesn’t exist – it clearly does when developers ship code they can’t fully trace – but that the comparison point matters. Traditional codebases accumulate the same kind of opaque, institutionally-dependent complexity over years; AI just compresses the timeline. Meyvis points to encapsulation, upfront architecture descriptions, and AI-assisted refactoring as practical mitigations. The framing lands at an interesting moment, as voices like Simon Willison and Martin Fowler have raised similar concerns from different angles. Most teams worried about AI-generated debt probably underestimate how much of it they already carry in legacy systems nobody wants to touch.
