GoKawiilI’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.
Oh, you want to know why? Sure. Let’s go for a drive. On a dark desert highway...
Productivity is Determined by Maintenance Costs
Every line of code you write has to be maintained: bug fixes, cleanup, dependency upgrades, and so forth. I’m not talking about new features or enhancements. Just maintenance. For every month you spend writing code, you’ll spend some amount of time in the following year maintaining that code, and some in each year after that, forever, as long as that code exists.
Let’s say you asked a crowd of, say, 50 developers what those maintenance costs were. Using a technique called Wisdom of the Crowd, you could get a reasonably accurate response.1
Your crowd might tell you that, for each month you spend writing code, you’ll spend...
10 days on maintenance in the first year; and
5 days on maintenance each year after that.
If you were a particularly obsessive individual, you could spend hours making a spreadsheet modeling how those estimates affect productivity over time. A spreadsheet like this.
The first month of a new project is glorious. You spend all your time building fancy new features.
... continue reading