This still seems like technical debt to me. It's just debt with a much higher compounding interest rate and/or shorter due date. Credit cards vs. traditional loans or mortgages.

>And six months later you discover you’ve built exactly what the spec said — and nothing the customer actually wanted.

That's not a developer problem, it's a PM/business problem. Your PM or equivalent should be neck deep in finding out what to build. Some developers like doing that (likely for free) but they can't spend as much time on it as a PM because they have other responsibilities, so they are not as likely not as good at it.

If you are building POCs (and everyone understands it's a POC), then AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards. Having something to interact with is still way better than passively staring at designs or mockup slides.

Developers being able to spend less time on code that is helpful but likely to be thrown away is a good thing IMO.