> Hasn't the economics of maintenance and change shifted so much that accidental complexity isn't actually all that expensive/painful?
I sincerely believe that extensive accidental complexity will ALSO be bad for AI agents. Their quality will diminish as their context windows get filled up with endless amounts of spaghetti and accidental complexity. I feel like we won't fully start feeling those effects for another year or so.
True, yet they have a Moore's Law like growth going for properties like their context windows.. I think the larger problem with letting them be verbose is Occam's razor. The more verbose they are the more variant behavior they will have where any variation that is not strictly necessary is likely to include incorrect behavior.