Conflating technical debt with financial terms is an interesting tact, but I feel it is a bad tool for analysis. Their own chart shows a declining cost of softw

Conflating technical debt with financial terms is an interesting tact, but I feel it is a bad tool for analysis. Their own chart shows a declining cost of software. I feel that complexity (not the lack of refactoring away technical debt) is a far better proxy for analysis. The complexity inherent in software development reached a minimum in the era of Visual Basic and Borland's Delphi, and has rapidly increased since then in the abandoning of the Windows Desktop and the Win32 UI as a standard and fairly reliable platform for applications. It was possible to build and deploy applications in a rapid enough fashion that agile just happened without prompting in many one-man development projects. In fact, many domain experts were able to craft their own reliable and usable (to them) applications that remain in use to this day. That world existed, and has largely been abandoned. I suspect what AI tooling will enable in aggregate (if we're lucky) is a return to the levels of productivity we previously had, despite the multiple new layers of interfaces and abstractions inherent in the non-Win32-GUI world we now inhabit. Thus, I feel if you want to see how AI/LLMs are going to effect the economy and our profession, look to the effects of the Win32 desktop on software in terms of size and scale of disruption. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. -- EDIT/APPEND -- in an era of "free" debt, where the interest is effectively zero, management learns to spend money like crazy, and let the debt stack up, because it is the efficient thing to do When that management mindset is mis-applied to understanding when the programmers say "we've got tech debt we've got to pay off".... they incorrectly assume it has no cost in interest, and can be ignored, as with money debt... except it does have interest.... loan shark levels of interest