> 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.