Nobody Wants to Do Maintenance
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut wasn’t talking about software. But he could have been.
Maintenance has always been the unglamorous part of the job. New features get roadmaps and launch announcements. Fixing that gnarly bug from 2019 gets a Jira ticket nobody touches.
Now we have AI coding assistants that let us build faster than ever. A developer with Copilot or Claude Code can produce in an afternoon what used to take a week. That is genuinely exciting.
But here is what concerns me.
If building was already the easy part, and maintenance was already the part nobody wanted, what happens when we multiply the output?
We are about to have more code than ever before. More code written faster. More code written by people who understood the problem less deeply because the AI filled in the gaps for them. And all of that code will need someone to maintain it when the framework updates, when a dependency has a CVE, when the edge case nobody considered finally shows up in production.
AI does not help you maintain code you do not understand. It helps you generate more of it.
I am not saying we should slow down. I use AI assistants every day, and they are genuinely useful. But we need to be honest about the curve we are on. Building has gotten cheaper. Maintenance has not. The gap between those two things is where technical debt lives.
My advice: when you ship AI-assisted code, treat understanding the code as part of shipping it. Read what it wrote. Write down why it works the way it does. If you cannot explain it to a teammate, you have not finished.
Because someone is going to maintain this code. And if we are not careful, that someone will be us, staring at a codebase we barely remember writing.
