The AI Feedback Loop

There’s an attitude in software developers these days. It’s this idea that “it doesn’t really matter if we understand it, AI can fix it later.”

They might be right.

The shortcut that eats your codebase

Every codebase erodes the same way. Not in one dramatic moment, but in a hundred small decisions to not look.

• The PR has a 1000-line function. Well, the tests pass.
• Gemini pasted the same ISO date parser into 8 files, and into the unit tests itself. We’ll DRY it out later.
• Claude installed some helper package that hasn’t been touched on GitHub in seven years. Eh, it works.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. But the throughline is the same: nobody on the team actually understands what just got merged. And nobody has to, because if it breaks, you just paste the error back into the chat and a new diff comes out the other side.

The codebase becomes a black box that only the model can see into. And here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

If AI is the only thing that understands it, AI is the only thing that can change it

This is the part people don’t say out loud.

The moment your codebase passes a certain threshold of “nobody here can read this anymore,” you’ve handed the keys to the model.

You haven’t automated your work. You’ve outsourced your comprehension of how the system should behave.

The bill is coming

Here’s where the math gets unfun.

Right now, you’re getting Sonnet-tier intelligence for what is, frankly, an absurd price. That’s not because tokens are cheap to produce. It’s because the entire industry is in a capex arms race, burning billions on compute and chips while pulling in a combined revenue projected at something like $80–120M.

That gap closes one of two ways: inference cost (the cost of using tokens) keeps dropping and prices fall further, or the bill comes due and prices climb.

Now imagine you’ve built a system that requires an LLM in the loop to be maintainable. Not as a productivity boost, as a hard dependency. When per-token pricing doubles, or rate limits tighten, or your preferred model gets deprecated and the replacement is 3x the cost, that isn’t a line item you can renegotiate. That’s your engineering team’s ability to ship.

You will have built a codebase that costs money to read.