I feel like AI might let us model some of the things that we initially didn't scope that led to these problems (e.g. "Decided not to fix every bug, or upgrade every dependency") - being able to more easily ask a system that can dig into "how much time are we spending on stuff related to foo"

AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't make decisions that have these same tail effort profiles. That can be things like building out tooling to handle maintenance updates

I think the real thing that comes out of AI tooling is probably that the tooling needs to be trained (or steered) towards activities that enhance human attention management.