AI coding tools are making this problem worse in a subtle way. When an agent can generate a "scalable event-driven architecture" in 5 minutes, the build cost of complexity drops to near zero. But the maintenance cost doesn't.
So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onboarding, incident response at 3am - stays exactly the same or gets worse, because now nobody fully understands what was generated.
The real test for simplicity has always been: can the next person who touches this code understand it without asking you? AI-generated complexity fails that test spectacularly.
So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onboarding, incident response at 3am - stays exactly the same or gets worse, because now nobody fully understands what was generated.
The real test for simplicity has always been: can the next person who touches this code understand it without asking you? AI-generated complexity fails that test spectacularly.