You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs
Key takeaways
- I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs.
- Every line of code you write has to be maintained: bug fixes, cleanup, dependency upgrades, and so forth.
- Let’s say you asked a crowd of, say, 50 developers what those maintenance costs were.
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.
Oh, you want to know why? Sure. Let’s go for a drive. On a dark desert highway...
Every line of code you write has to be maintained: bug fixes, cleanup, dependency upgrades, and so forth. I’m not talking about new features or enhancements. Just maintenance. For every month you spend writing code, you’ll spend some amount of time in the following year maintaining that code, and some in each year after that, forever, as long as that code exists.