Technical debt isn't what it used to be. AI is incredibly good at generating technical debt if you don't supervise it.
For example, over the last few months, AI happily generated all kinds of variations for empty states and loading spinners in
PaperFox.ai —custom styles, inline CSS, slightly different components - it works, but it leaves a mess: inconsistent states across ~165 files.
This morning, I guided Claude Code through a massive refactor to standardize everything on simple shadcn/ui components across the entire codebase.
I have to say, watching AI systematically clean up this mess (~4,000 lines changed) is extremely fulfilling - I cooked a meal while waiting ;).
Normally, this kind of refactoring is tedious, labor-intensive, and doesn’t directly impact functionality so it sits at the bottom of the backlog forever and never gets done.
Now with AI, we can actually afford to pay down the technical debt (which, ironically, often created by AI itself).
#AI #Refactoring #BuildInPublic #TechnicalDebt #PaperFox