Evgeniy LatuhinMay 11
James Shore

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

May 10 at 10:09pmWeb
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)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.

Show threadDr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶May 10
@jamesshore @rayckeith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
Using an LLM to code is like a credit card for technical debt. The interest rate if you don't pay it off will kill you.
Technical debt - Wikipedia

Show threadColin BurgessMay 11
@jamesshore so is the trick to ONLY use it to help with maintenance?
Show threadTimo Laine (he/him)May 11

@jamesshore This is interesting. In other words, are we moving the bottleneck from programming to maintenance?

https://mastodon.green/@timolaine/116517597532725227

Timo Laine (he/him) (@[email protected])

"When we deploy a digital tool like email to speed up communication, or generative AI to create (sloppy) slide presentations quickly, we don’t automatically become better at our jobs. If these steps don’t improve the bottleneck in our process – the key link where the real value is produced – then, as in the chicken coop example, they’re just as likely to create pile-ups and distraction, without actually boosting our true productivity." https://calnewport.com/on-bottlenecks-and-productivity/ #GenerativeAI #TheoryOfConstraints

Mastodon.green
Show threadMatthew MillerMay 11

@timolaine @jamesshore

I think: it always was.