In my experience, the easiest way to reduce maintenance costs comes from better planning upstream (better task definitions, ACs, test coverage etc), and most im

In my experience, the easiest way to reduce maintenance costs comes from better planning upstream (better task definitions, ACs, test coverage etc), and most important of all, it comes from giving the AI coding tools a shared context for the entire project that is a living artifact that grows with the project. In order to make that happen, we employ a single AI for the entire project (instead of each developer having their own) that is able to provide the right context to agents when they need it and update the context as each agent produces the output.