There is a story most developers tell themselves about technical debt. You moved too fast. You cut corners. You shipped features under pressure and told yourself you would clean it up later. Later never came. That story made sense before AI coding tools existed. It makes less sense now. Today a lot of technical debt does not come from moving fast. It comes from moving fast with an AI that has no standard to follow. What AI technical debt actually looks like It does not look like obvious shortcuts. It looks like a codebase where every feature was built correctly in isolation but nothing fits together. Components that handle state differently depending on which session built them. Naming that is consistent within a file but inconsistent across the project. TypeScript that is strict in some places and full of any in others. Nobody cut corners. Nobody made bad decisions. GitHub Copilot made a lot of small decisions across a lot of sessions and none of them were wrong on their own. They just were not the same.…