At agentic coding velocity, tech debt becomes obvious much more quickly. Empirical evidence is a bit of a ridiculous bar to hold for software development - we are as quantitatively blind now as we have ever been - but at least for me the anecdotal evidence is very clear. Today's agents hill-climb and their software architecture is pretty reliably bad without a human in the loop.
And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.
And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.