It's safe to say that most people romanticize their past experience. Anyone's "golden age" is someone else's "end times".

Software has always sucked [1]. "Software crisis" was coined in 1968. There has been no period of time since that it got any better. Trauma just doesn't carry the same way that triumphs do.

Perhaps people do not actually learn from their mistakes after all.

[1]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

> Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

While that is true, there's a large difference you are ignoring: a company can survive this type of rot indefinitely if it takes place at a certain rate. Their customers get time to acclimatise , the processes take into account the breakage, and adapt to compensate, etc.

If the AI boosters are to be believed (2x, or 10x or even, in some cases, devs claiming 100x productivity), stuffing 2 decades of rot into the next two years could prove fatal.

This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure.

I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.