Meanwhile, the complexity of the average piece of software is drastically increasing. ... The stats suggest that devs are shipping more code with coding agents. The consequences may already be visible: analysis of vendor status pages [3] shows outages have steadily increased since 2022, suggesting software is becoming more brittle.

We've already seen a large-scale AWS outage because of this. It could get much worse. In a few years, we could have major infrastructure outages that the AI can't fix, and no human left understands the code.

AI coders, as currently implemented, don't have a design-level representation of what they're doing other than the prompt history and the code itself. That inherently leads to complexity growth. This isn't fundamental to AI. It's just a property of the way AI-driven coding is done now.

Is anybody working on useful design representations as intermediate forms used in AI-driven coding projects?

"The mending apparatus is itself in need of mending" - "The Machine Stops", by E.M. Forster, 1909.