The Zero-Cost Trap: Why AI Code is a Liability

There’s something we don’t like to admit in this industry: code isn’t an asset. It’s a liability.

It didn’t use to be cheap or easy to create that liability. Writing code was hard. You had to think, know your syntax, put in the hours. That difficulty was actually useful. It slowed things down. It kept codebases from blowing up.

We all hit a wall when we try to write (or even imagine) really complex code. With LLMs and generative AI, that wall is basically gone.

The Death of Friction

Writing more code used to cost something. Now it doesn’t. One prompt and you get hundreds of lines. Boilerplate, scaffolding, whatever you asked for.

On paper that’s a productivity dream. That’s also where the problem is.

We’re producing code way faster. But we’re not better at reading it, understanding it, or maintaining it. Our brains haven’t gotten an upgrade. We can’t scale our attention to match a GPU cluster.

The Illusion of Speed

That big codebase you generated in a few seconds? It’s not just a delivered feature. It’s debt. Your team will carry it.

Spaghetti code used to mean someone messed up or didn’t care. Now even good engineers end up with systems that are impossible to follow. Not because they’re bad at their job. Because it’s too easy to add more.

One thing to remember: the machine writes the code. You still have to debug it.

The New Bottleneck

Engineers aren’t stuck because they don’t know syntax or can’t cook up algorithms. The bottleneck is different now. It’s making sense of things.

We’re drowning in logic we didn’t write and, honestly, don’t really understand.

So what makes someone a “senior” engineer is shifting. The ones who’ll do well in the next ten years won’t be the ones who get AI to spit out code the fastest. They’ll be the ones who know when to say no.

The Value of Restraint

The people who’ll come out on top are the ones who look at that tempting pile of AI-generated solutions and still pick the simple option. The ones who care about less code, and are willing to go slower to keep things maintainable.

Code is basically free now. The cost of that “free” code? Higher than it’s ever been.