Why AI is creating a technical debt crisis
Summary
AI tools help junior developers code faster but often produce disorganized, less maintainable Apex code that accumulates technical debt. This happens because AI lacks understanding of high-level architecture and best design practices, leading to repeated and poorly structured code. For Salesforce teams, it’s a warning that AI is a tool to assist developers, not replace them, and careful oversight is required to avoid long-term code quality issues.
Takeaways
- AI accelerates code output but often increases technical debt.
- Review and refactor AI-generated Apex to maintain architecture standards.
- Avoid relying solely on AI to replace experienced developers.
- Use shared functions to reduce repeated code from AI outputs.
- Recognize AI as a developer assistant, not a full code replacer.
Well, it seems AI is not producing the results we hoped for. A recent survey has uncovered some interesting facts. For example, although AI helps junior developers produce 35% faster, the results are actually less maintainable. The main issue is, AI is not good at keeping track of high level architecture and design patterns. Instead, it spits out code that mostly works, but is not well organized. The result is, instead of getting better code from fewer devs, you get more technical debt that needs devs to eventually fix. A few companies are starting to admit this publicly, I’ve noticed this myself when using AI to write apex in Salesforce. Sometimes the AI needs a directional change from what it proposes. Sometimes it repeats chunks of code that really should be in a shared function. The takeaway The industry is realizing that replacing devs with AI creates massive liabilities. So while AI can help devs, it still doesn’t replace them.