Just aim the cannon correctly

James Shore has a post I found myself nodding along to until the very last step, where he loses me. The thesis is clean: Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. Productivity over the long haul, he argues, isn't bounded by how fast you can produce code — it's bounded by maintenance cost, which compounds. Any coding agent that accelerates production without taming maintenance is, definitionally, a debt-laundering operation: it lets you skip the bill today and pay it forever afterward. Each individual claim is, I think, correct. Code is debt; maintenance compounds; an agent that bolts on features faster than your team can absorb them is, given a long enough horizon, an anti-productivity tool. The conclusion Shore stops just short of stating — that current LLM tooling is, on net, bad — is where I get off the train of thought. A useful frame that I like across a variety of contexts is that of a difficulty…