Technical Debt and the ROI Threshold: Why Code is Getting Cheaper
Hi Focus AI Community,
Today’s essay explores how the falling cost of coding—thanks to automation and AI agents—reshapes our approach to technical debt and project investment.
Highlights:
As coding becomes easier and agents take on more work, the old rules about technical debt and ROI are changing fast.
The cost of writing and maintaining code is dropping, making experimentation and rapid iteration more attractive.
With agents now able to read and refactor code, the future cost of messy code is shrinking.
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Code is easier now, which has some interesting properties to how and what we think about working on.
For example: owning something is to maintain it and maintenance has costs.
...
The growing ability for these agents to understand code means the cost of maintaining and producing functionality will go down. The code itself is being disposable. When the cost of making something goes down, there's going to be a lot more of it, and it releases a break that has been slowing things down.
Read the full essay on The Focus AI
Related: MCP, an accidentally universal plugin system?
Happy coding!
— The Focus AI Team