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How to manage technical debt as AI-generated code increases

By Freedom251 Team · · 10 min read

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Manage AI-generated code as part of your normal software-development system, not as a special debt category that automation can eliminate. Keep generated changes small, continuously testable and clearly owned by a person; make policy and data boundaries explicit; and judge success by maintainability, delivery stability and user outcomes rather than by lines of code or accepted AI suggestions.

AI can help locate, explain and reduce existing debt. It can also increase output faster than a team’s review, testing and platform practices can absorb. The practical answer is a tighter feedback loop: establish expectations before scaling use, verify code while it is being written, require human understanding at merge time, record debt as product work and measure quality and flow together.

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Why increasing AI output changes the debt problem

Technical debt is the future cost created when a software decision makes later change harder, riskier or more expensive. The decision may be deliberate, such as shipping a temporary workaround, or accidental, such as accepting code nobody fully understands. AI assistance changes the speed and volume of those decisions; it does not change who is accountable for them.

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DORA’s 2025 State of AI-assisted Software Development Report surveyed nearly 5,000 technology professionals and added more than 100 hours of qualitative work. Its central description is that “AI’s primary role in software development is that of an amplifier”: capable organizations can amplify their strengths, while weak testing, unclear ownership or slow review can be amplified too.

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That is why generated-code volume is a poor standalone productivity measure. A larger diff can represent useful capability, duplicated logic, hidden security exposure or future rework. A team that writes code faster but spends the saved time in review queues, integration failures or incident response has moved effort, not necessarily improved delivery.

DORA’s 2026 article reports that 30% of developers said they had little or no trust in AI-generated code. That is a time-specific survey finding, not a universal quality score. In DORA’s 2024 findings, 39% of developers outside Google trusted generative-AI output only “a little” or “not at all.” Treat those results as a reason to instrument your own workflow, not as proof that AI code is inherently defective.

One participant quoted anonymously by DORA captured the trade-off: “AI tools increase my productivity, they write code faster than I could, but the code is (currently) lower quality than I could write myself.” The appropriate response is to improve verification and feedback, rather than to count generated lines as finished value.

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What technical debt looks like in AI-assisted code

AI-assisted debt is usually recognizable through the same consequences as any other debt: a change takes longer than expected, behavior is difficult to explain, tests are missing, or a workaround multiplies future work. The origin matters for prevention, but the remediation belongs in the same planning system as other engineering work.

Design debt

Generated code may satisfy the immediate prompt while introducing duplicated abstractions, leaky boundaries or an API that conflicts with the rest of the system. In the exploratory 2026 study by Abdullah Al Mujahid and Mia Mohammad Imran, 33 of 81 selected comments concerned design debt. Those comments came from public repositories and describe self-admitted problems, not the share of all software that has design debt.

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Requirement debt

A model can implement an underspecified interpretation of a requirement. If product behavior, error handling or compliance rules were never made explicit, the code can look complete while encoding the wrong decision. The same study found 17 selected comments concerning requirement debt.

Test debt

Generated paths are easy to accept when the happy path works, but edge cases, failure handling and compatibility behavior may remain untested. The study found 17 selected comments concerning test debt. A missing test is a delivery risk even when the implementation appears clean.

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Understanding and uncertainty debt

Warning signs include unresolved TODOs, deferred tests, comments that say a model produced the code, and contributors who cannot explain why a branch or dependency is necessary. Uncertainty is a signal to investigate, not an automatic verdict that the code must be discarded.

Set expectations before developers scale AI use

Publish a short acceptable-use policy before adoption becomes an informal, inconsistent practice. DORA’s Fostering Trust in AI guidance associates transparent policy with greater developer trust and notes that lightweight guidance can signal sanctioned use.

Define approved work and data boundaries

  • List tasks where assistance is permitted, such as test scaffolding, documentation drafts, repetitive transformations or exploratory prototypes.
  • Identify tasks that require additional approval, such as authentication, authorization, cryptography, safety-critical logic, migrations and handling of confidential or regulated data.
  • Specify which tools and model accounts are approved, what data may be sent, how prompts and outputs are retained, and how secrets must be excluded.

Make accountability unambiguous

  • Name the engineer responsible for verifying every proposed change, regardless of who or what produced the first draft.
  • Require the author to understand the accepted behavior, dependencies, failure modes and operational impact.
  • State that generated code follows the same licensing, security, accessibility and coding-standard requirements as handwritten code.

Publish the verification contract

Document the tests, linters, type checks, security scans, performance checks and repository-specific validations required before merge. Include the project’s coding conventions and examples of acceptable use. A policy that only says “use AI responsibly” gives reviewers no actionable standard.

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Put verification in the authoring path

Large end-of-process audits are an expensive way to discover defects. Run fast checks continuously and return useful feedback to the author while the change is being shaped. Human review then concentrates on correctness, fit and maintainability instead of rediscovering basic syntax or style errors.

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  1. Clarify the intended behavior. Write the requirement, constraints, interfaces and failure cases before asking for implementation. If the behavior cannot be stated clearly, the task is not ready for generation.
  2. Generate a narrow proposal. Ask for one coherent function, test, migration step or documentation change rather than an entire subsystem. Keep the surrounding context sufficient for consistency but small enough to inspect.
  3. Run automated checks immediately. Execute unit and integration tests, linting, type checks, dependency and security scans, and any repository-specific validation. Fail fast on a broken contract.
  4. Review the resulting diff. Remove speculative abstractions, duplicated logic, unnecessary dependencies and code unrelated to the requirement. Check error paths and boundary conditions, not only the successful example.
  5. Have the author explain it. The responsible engineer should be able to describe the control flow, data handling, assumptions, test coverage and likely operational failure modes without relying on the model to answer.
  6. Submit a reviewable change. Include the purpose, verification performed, known limitations and any follow-up debt item in the pull request. Keep the change small enough for another engineer to reason about.

Should AI-generated code get a different code review?

It should not receive a lower standard or an automatic penalty. Apply the same acceptance criteria to every change, then add provenance and understanding questions when AI assistance was used. The review focus should reflect risk, not the stigma or novelty of the tool.

Review dimension Question for every change Additional AI-assisted check
Reviewability Is the diff focused, coherent and small enough to inspect? Was generated output reduced to the minimum required implementation, with speculative code removed?
Feedback speed Do automated checks expose defects before merge? Did the author run checks during development instead of presenting an unverified bulk output?
Human ownership Can the author explain and maintain the behavior? Can the author identify model assumptions, altered code and remaining uncertainty?
Governance fit Does the change follow data, security and coding policies? Were prompts, inputs and generated dependencies kept within approved boundaries?
Delivery quality Is the change likely to improve stability and user outcomes? What evidence shows that faster implementation will not shift cost into rework, incidents or recovery?
Developer experience Does the workflow help engineers build durable skill and trust? Can the team choose where assistance helps instead of being forced to use it everywhere?

These dimensions synthesize guidance from the 2026 Technical Debt in the AI Era manifesto and DORA’s AI guidance. The manifesto’s stated goal is “to shift the focus from automation-focused Technical Debt management to human-driven decision-making throughout the development lifecycle, albeit supported by automation.”

Control change size when generation makes large diffs easy

Require AI-assisted work to arrive in small, testable batches. A model can produce a large pull request in seconds, but reviewers still need to understand every behavior and interaction. Small batches narrow the failure surface, shorten feedback time and make rollback practical.

  • Separate refactoring from behavior changes so a defect has a clear location.
  • Prefer one user-visible outcome or one migration stage per change.
  • Split generated tests, implementation and cleanup when that makes intent clearer.
  • Set a review-size expectation based on complexity and risk, not a universal line-count limit.
  • Stop and divide a change when the author cannot explain a section or when checks take too long to provide feedback.

Small batches are a countermeasure identified in DORA’s Balancing AI tensions: Moving from AI adoption to effective SDLC use. They also make debt visible earlier: an unexplained workaround or missing test cannot hide inside an enormous generated diff.

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Record and prioritize debt as product work

Keep debt items in the normal planning and ownership system rather than in a separate list that nobody schedules. Each item should describe a consequence and a next action, not merely label code as “AI-generated.”

Debt-record field What to capture How it supports a decision
Affected component Service, module, interface, data path or operational process Identifies the owner and the boundary of remediation
Observed consequence Maintenance delay, defect pattern, security exposure, instability or blocked change Connects the item to a business or delivery outcome
Evidence Failing test, incident, repeated workaround, review finding, metric trend or unexplained behavior Separates an evidenced problem from a preference
Remediation Specific next step, such as adding coverage, replacing an abstraction or clarifying a requirement Turns a label into work that can be estimated
Priority factors Risk, user impact, recurrence, change frequency, operational instability and cost of delay Balances urgency against other product work
Owner and review date Responsible team or engineer and the point at which the item will be reassessed Prevents debt from becoming unowned background noise

Do not assume every AI-assisted change deserves remediation. Prioritize debt that increases the chance or cost of failure, repeatedly slows delivery, or sits in a high-change area. A low-risk, stable utility may be acceptable; the same uncertainty in an authentication path or billing workflow deserves earlier attention.

Measure whether AI assistance improves the system

Start with a baseline, introduce one workflow change at a time where practical, and inspect quality and flow together. Lines of code, prompt count and accepted suggestions describe activity, not value.

Measure What to watch Why it matters
Delivery throughput Completed changes or user outcomes over time Shows whether faster implementation produces more useful delivery
Change stability Failed deployments, rollbacks and production incidents Detects quality costs hidden by higher output
Review turnaround Time from pull request creation to approval and merge Reveals whether generated volume is creating a review bottleneck
Rework Reopened changes, follow-up fixes and repeated modifications Shows whether the first pass is durable
Recovery Time to restore service after a failed change Measures operational impact, not just coding speed
Developer experience Confidence, cognitive load, ability to learn and control over AI use Indicates whether the process builds sustainable capability

Interpret the measures as a set. A faster coding step may simply move time into review, integration or incident response. Compare trends over a meaningful period and account for release mix, staffing and major architectural work before attributing a change to AI.

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Use uncertainty comments as investigation triggers

The exploratory study “Fix the Mess Gemini Created”: Towards Understanding GenAI-Induced Self-Admitted Technical Debt screened 6,540 comments referencing large language models and found 81 that also self-admitted a technical shortcoming. The comments came from public GitHub Python and JavaScript repositories between November 2022 and July 2025.

Among those 81 comments, 33 concerned design debt, 17 requirement debt and 17 test debt. The counts describe the study’s selected comments, not the distribution of debt in software overall. Keyword-based screening can miss relevant cases or include comments that do not represent substantial debt. The authors caution that the sample does not establish prevalence and may not generalize to private projects, other languages or later workflows.

Use comments such as “needs verification,” “temporary generated workaround,” or “unclear why this works” to open a focused investigation. Confirm the behavior, add the missing test or explanation, and either schedule remediation or record why the risk is acceptable. Do not use a keyword detector as an automatic debt score.

Keep learning and developer choice in the process

Training should cover both the working language and the organization’s codebase: architecture, error-handling conventions, testing patterns, dependency policy and operational practices. Developers need enough domain knowledge to evaluate an answer rather than merely accept plausible syntax.

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DORA’s trust guidance emphasizes the value of evaluating output in a familiar language and retaining control over how AI is used. Let teams choose where assistance is useful, share examples of successful and unsuccessful use, and make it easy to report a problematic output without blaming the person who tried the tool. Forced adoption can hide uncertainty; informed choice surfaces it.

A practical management loop

  1. Baseline. Record current delivery, stability, review and rework measures, and identify components where debt already impedes change.
  2. Set policy. Publish approved tasks, data boundaries, accountability, coding conventions and required checks.
  3. Pilot narrowly. Choose a low-risk workflow, keep changes small and run the full verification path.
  4. Inspect outcomes. Compare quality, flow and developer-experience measures rather than counting generated output.
  5. Register debt. Capture evidence, consequence, owner and remediation for problems that persist.
  6. Adjust. Expand useful practices, tighten safeguards where incidents or rework rise, and retire workflows that do not improve outcomes.

This loop treats AI as a change to the development system. Automation supplies speed and signals; people decide what the software should do, whether it is safe to ship and which future costs are worth accepting.

What the evidence can and cannot establish

DORA’s findings describe organizations and survey respondents; they do not prove that adopting AI causes a particular result for every team. The technical-debt study examines self-admitted comments rather than all generated code and is limited to public Python and JavaScript repositories. Neither source supports the claim that every AI-generated change creates debt.

The defensible position is conditional: AI increases the importance of reviewability, fast feedback, explicit ownership and outcome-based measurement. Teams that make those conditions visible can use assistance while keeping debt manageable; teams that measure only output risk discovering the cost later in maintenance and operations.

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