AI-volution

 A narrow definition of tech debt could be "static-ness". Whether it be documentation, configuration, or code. The underlying real world changes, but the static capture doesn’t change with them.

I can see a future where AI takes care of that. We simply feed a definition of product success without implementation details and ask AI to maintain the success of that definition by evolving the system. Whether that means patching the hardware, updating the infrastructure and platforms, responding to changes in input or output systems, rotating secrets, various requests, updating code, updating security, or updating documentation.

There would need to be another AI of course, auditing everything the first does for code quality, code standards, security, compliance, privacy, etc. And the two would be permanently pitted against each other.

And I don’t think this is a long-term prediction either. I think Claude could do this with the tools we have today just not 100% successfully, and with low stability and quality at first.

For a long term prediction, I'd say AI "becomes" the computer. I mean that in the sense that the network became the computer (the computer basically an almost dumb terminal to access that resource), and then the internet became the computer. Our interface to it all will just be AI, and the rest a dumb terminal, and all of the underlying implementation a black box (maybe not to us, but to our children).