AI Is Creating a New Kind of Tech Debt — And Nobody Is Talking About It

Six months ago, my team was celebrating. We had shipped more features in Q3 than in the entire previous year. Our velocity was through the roof. AI tools had transformed how we worked — what used to take a week was taking a day. What used to take a day was taking an hour. Our CTO sent a company-wide Slack message: "This is what the future of engineering looks like." Last month, we had to stop all feature development for three weeks. Not because of a security breach. Not because of a server outage. Because our codebase had become so tangled with AI-generated code that nobody — not even the people who had "written" it — could confidently modify it anymore. We had celebrated our way into a crisis. And the worst part? I saw it coming. I just didn't know what I was looking at. 🧵 The New Tech Debt Nobody Named Until Now Technical debt is old news. Every developer knows the feeling — rushing to ship, cutting corners, promising yourself you'll refactor later. The code works today. It'll be so