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)May 10

@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.

Show threadJames ShoreMay 10
@jmeowmeow Thanks!
Show threadJeff Miller (orange hatband)
@jamesshore Better you bringing the news about maintenance costs than the auditors hired by the Board of Directors two years hence.
May 11 at 12:38amWeb