Agentic Debt

5 points by neilkakkar 171 days ago | 2 comments

jollyllama 171 days ago |

> This feels like a new kind of problem. It’s not the classic technical debt - no human consciously chose to re-create three different UIs, all almost the same. It’s something more specific to how agents write code.

I don't really see how it's any different than if humans decided to do it.

> Unlike tech debt, agentic debt is self-reinforcing.

How is tech debt not self-reinforcing? "Well, the last guy just copy-pasted this code for a new purpose instead of accomodating the new case, so rather than consolidate the codebase, I will just do the same, since it is too far gone?

In general, I agree with the problem. But I think it's a change in speed, not direction.

neilkakkar 165 days ago | |

Interesting, I feel humans are a lot more likely to consolidate because it's easier to reason / maintain when there's one component vs two.

Agree that it's _possible_ people don't do it, and things end up in a decaying codebase. But in my experience people tend to leave things better than they found them (or that's the culture I like to promote, at least when dealing with humans)