James ShoreMay 10

New blog:

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.

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs

James Shore: You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs

Show threadJeff Miller (orange hatband)

@jamesshore I love the framing that brings maintenance costs sharply into focus, because "what does the effect of agentic code assistance look like over time?" might be answered in coder terms as "a race into the Big Ball of Mud" or "shipping the prototype, over and over"...

...while the policy decisions on tooling are taken at a level where "cost of maintenance" communicates the issue in terms congruent to the questions on the table better than the terms a developer might use.

May 10 at 10:24pmWeb
Show threadJames ShoreMay 10
@jmeowmeow Thanks!
Show threadJeff Miller (orange hatband)May 11
@jamesshore Better you bringing the news about maintenance costs than the auditors hired by the Board of Directors two years hence.
Show threadJeff GriggMay 11

@jmeowmeow @jamesshore

Dittos!
I boosted the article because it makes a very good point -- one that is especially important, given that Generative AI LLM code generation does consistently *INCREASE* maintenance costs.

The article brings to light a vitally important question and risk -- even with the assumption that LLMs produced more code that was at least as maintainable. But things are not nearly that rosy. Quite the opposite, in reality.