AI-generated code has a maintenance problem nobody prices in

We optimised the wrong half of software. Writing code was never the expensive part — understanding it later was. AI made writing nearly free, which means we're now generating understanding-debt at industrial scale.

Here's the arithmetic nobody does. A feature takes an hour to generate and a day to truly review. Two years later, a bug surfaces in it, and the person debugging has none of the context — AI or human — that produced it. The cost didn't disappear. It moved.

What I do differently now

• generate less, on purpose: a smaller diff is a reviewable diff
• demand comments on the why, not the what — AI is good at explaining its reasoning if you make it
• keep a decision log per project: what was chosen, what was rejected, why. Future-me cannot interview past-model
• periodically rewrite generated code in my own voice. If my rewrite is shorter or clearer, the original was debt

The market implication

Teams are about to discover that the cost of software didn't collapse; it transformed. Generation is cheap, comprehension is dear. The valuable engineers of the next few years are the ones who can absorb large amounts of machine-written code into their own understanding — fast, but honestly.