That’s my immediate thought.

As we’ve seen happening in the open source projects with the piles of bugs being reported to them so much of what’s going on doesn’t seem to be new features, but just longstanding technical debt coming to the fore.

Maybe AI can’t write that new feature for us really fast. Maybe we asked. Maybe the code was complete garbage and it made it clear we really don’t want to keep piling on top of it and need to fix the issues we’ve known about for a long time. Adding new features at the old pace was a problem. We can’t handle the new.

Between that and the fact that some kinds of tech debt are much easier to pay off now that’s where a lot of our “new capacity” is going. Shoring things up.