AI makes technical debt manageable

I'm starting to think the most powerful thing about AI is that it lets me overcome technical debt.

It's cool that I can launch a site. It's cool that I can make a voice agent call me and have that magical holy-shit-this-works moment.

But looking back at the things I've built, launching was almost never the problem.

The wheels started falling off when technical debt built up.

Yesterday I found a bug in one of my dashboards that caused it to send multiple emails to people when it shouldn't have. Codex didn't just patch the bug. It refactored the underlying workflow so the same class of problem would be harder to create again.

Same thing with the voice-to-text tool I use constantly. It's an open source version of Whisper Flow that I've modified heavily.

When I first started modifying it, I thought it was cool. Then something broke the next day and I immediately thought, shit, I need to go back to the paid one.

This is something I rely on. It can't just randomly stop working.

But Codex is good enough to fix that stuff now. And not just get it working for the moment. It can usually fix it in a durable way.

Yes, I learned the word durable from AI. Yes, I know it's an AI tell. But sometimes AI is just smarter than me and I learn a useful word.

Being able to build cool things is great. But being able to keep them working, refactor them, and prevent the technical debt from slowly killing them is probably the bigger deal.