We will get an interesting effect if AI plateaus around where it does now, which is that AI code generation will bring "the long run" right down to "the medium run" if not on to the longer side of the short run. AI can take out technical debt an order of magnitude faster than human developers, easily, and I'm still waiting for it to recognize that an abstraction is necessary and invest into putting on in the code rather than spending the ones already present.

Of course if AI continues to proceed forward and we get to the point where the AIs can do that then they really will be able to craft vast code bases at speeds we could never keep up with on our own. However, I'm not particularly convinced LLMs are going to advance past this particular point, to a large degree because their training data contains so much of this slop approach to coding. Someone's going to have to come up with the next iteration of AI tech, I think.

I'm not so sure about that. All major software companies have enjoyed exponentially rising profits alongside steadily declining quality.

If you only knew how the enterprise space does stuff you'd realize how little a priority maintainability is.

I'm grateful we had Java when this stuff was taking off; if any enterprise applications were written in anything else available at the time (like C/C++) we'd all suffer even more memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, and data breaches than we do now.