And in a world where AI is doing the maintenance, that custom solution just sits in the repository like a landmine. A landmine. Yikes. Because when the next coding agent comes along tomorrow to, say, add a new feature, it reads that weird duplicated code. And because an AI learns from context, it just assumes this weird code is the standard way things are done at your company. Oh, no. So it learns the bad habit. Right. It then replicates that bad pattern. You end up actively misleading the next agent, which creates this massive cascading failure of technical debt. One rogue AI writes something functional but strange, and the next AI takes that strangeness as gospel and builds an entire system right on top of it.

So an AI might solve a problem by writing code that works flawlessly, but it might do so by introducing a completely alien architectural pattern that your company has just never used before. Oh, wow. Or it might duplicate an existing concept. So let's say you already have a perfectly good user authentication module hidden away in a different folder somewhere. The AI doesn't know it's there, so it just writes a brand new one from scratch.