Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
Your meticulously customized AI assistant is likely holding you back. Boris Cherny’s radical advice—delete your Claude.md every six months—reveals a hidden truth: customizations become technical debt as models evolve. Stop optimizing for yesterday’s weaknesses and start discovering what today’s AI can really do.
The clean code dogma says comments are a crutch. But code can only show ‘how’, never ‘why’. Without comments, your codebase becomes a beautiful graveyard of lost context. This article argues that the real technical debt isn’t messy code — it’s missing context. A comment is a gift to your future self, not a confession of failure.
AI doesn’t replace software architects – it makes them more valuable by exposing developers who skip the architectural grind. The paradox: as code generation becomes trivial, the need for deliberate system design explodes. Junior developers who rely on AI to avoid learning architecture become ‘AI operators’ – replaceable and dangerous. The real threat isn’t to your job, but to your ability to design.
Every ‘simple’ app hides a screaming backend. Tesler’s Law says complexity can’t be destroyed, only relocated. The best engineers don’t eliminate it—they decide where it hurts least. Stop chasing zero complexity. Start strategically allocating the mess.
AI coding agents write code faster than humans can review, creating a compounding technical debt crisis. The solution isn’t more oversight—it’s automated complexity hooks that force the agent to refactor when code gets too messy. This is the mechanical governor your codebase needs.
COBOL isn’t technical debt — it’s a technical asset. The real cost of replacing it isn’t just billions of dollars, but the irretrievable loss of deterministic business logic that modern systems can’t replicate. Most ‘modernization’ projects are resume-driven traps that destroy what works.
Most developers treat domain events as just another messaging pattern, but the real breakthrough is treating them as the single source of truth. By decoupling immutable facts from their reactions, your system stops being a fragile web of side effects and becomes a replayable, testable time machine.
Terse commit messages like ‘fix’ or ‘update’ aren’t efficiency — they’re technical debt that steals time from your future self and teammates. Every vague commit forces a detective game. The fix is simple: add the ‘why’ behind the change. Code explains the present; a good commit message explains the past.
The cost of generating code has collapsed thanks to LLMs, but that’s a trap for engineering managers. As code becomes cheaper to produce, technical debt accumulates faster than ever. The bottleneck shifts from writing code to managing the quality of what’s already been written. Managers who keep measuring velocity will lose control. The new metric: how much code you didn’t write.
We are obsessing over the speed of AI code generation, but a new longitudinal study reveals a darker reality. AI-generated code lacks organic evolution, creating a ticking time bomb of latent defects that only surface months after merge. The real challenge isn’t writing code; it’s surviving the post-merge lifecycle.