“Tornike, what do you think of AI coding tools?”

I like to answer this frequent question by way of an example. An example of two companies. It goes something like this:

Imagine two very similar companies. Both companies generate similar revenue and produce a similar software product. The only difference between these companies is that Company A uses 1 million lines of code and Company B uses 100 thousand lines of code. Which company is better off?

Clearly, the company with fewer lines of code is better off. They have fewer lines of code and so they can understand and modify their code more quickly. All other things being equal, less code is better. Put another way code is a form of debt. If you use an AI to generate code, you are effectively getting a debt – a debt of code.

Is it worth going into code debt? It depends. Debt can be both good or bad, it might have interest or be interest-free. Debt can also allow faster growth or it can cause your project to implode. In all cases it is important to have easy access to these debt-generating tools. It is still up to you to generate the code debt responsibly.

Thanks to Ani Talakhadze for reading drafts of this