Everyone's bragging about how fast AI writes code now. Nobody's talking about...

Everyone's bragging about how fast AI writes code now. Nobody's talking about what it costs to keep that code running.

James Shore did the math, and it's uncomfortable. If your AI coding agent doubles your output but your maintenance costs stay the same per line, you didn't save anything. You doubled your maintenance burden. If it doubles your output and doubles the cost of maintaining it? You just quadrupled your problem.

Speed gains only work if maintenance costs drop by the exact inverse. Anything else and you're borrowing from next year to look productive today.

Teams ship a feature in two days instead of two weeks, everyone celebrates, and six months later they're drowning in code nobody fully understands (because nobody fully wrote it). The AI didn't create technical debt on purpose. It just made it trivially easy to create a lot of it, fast.

Next time a vendor or your dev team pitches you "10x developer productivity," ask one question: what's the maintenance multiplier? If they don't have an answer, they're not measuring the thing that actually matters.