Is a Technical Debt ZIRP a good thing?
A few days back, I linked to Scott Werner's clever insight that—rather than fear the mess created by AI codegen—we should think through the flip side: an army of robots working tirelessly to clean up our code has the potential to bring the carrying cost of technical debt way down, akin to the previous decade's zero-interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP). Scott was inspired by Orta Therox's retrospective on six weeks of Claude Code at Puzzmo, which Orta himself wrote after reading my own Full-breadth Developers post.
Blogging is so back!
If you aren't familiar with Brian Marick, he's a whip-smart thinker with a frustrating knack for making contrarian points that are hard to disagree with. He saw my link and left this comment on Scott's blog post about technical debt and ZIRP. The whole comment is worth reading and should have top-billing as a post in its own right, so I figured I'd highlight it here:
The problem with a ZIRP is that those questions are b-o-r-i-n-g and you can't compete with those who skip them. You're out of business before they crash. ("The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.")
Similarly, there's a collective action problem. Our society is structured such that when the optimists' predictions go wrong, they don't pay for their mistakes – rather society as a whole does. See housing derivatives in 2008, the Asian financial crisis of the late '90s, etc. ZIRP makes it cheaper to be an optimist, but someone else pays the bill for failure (Silicon Valley Bank, Savings and Loan crisis)
It's weird to see ZIRP touted as a model, given the incredible overspending that took place, which had to be clawed back once ZIRP went away. (Most notably in tech layoffs, but I'm more concerned about all the small companies that were crushed because of financials, not because of the merit of their products.)
Brian made me ashamed to admit that I had read Scott's post as an exclusively good thing, despite the fact that on a macro level, he's absolutely right: the excesses of irrational exuberance and their unfair consequences are definitely net-harmful to society. No argument there. Someone should absolutely get on that and, of course, literally no one will.
Why am I unbothered? Because as a customer, I am happy to ride a ZIRP wave for my own personal benefit. That way, even if the world burns in the end, at least I got something out of it. Last time around, I benefited from a shitload of free cloud compute, cheap taxi rides, subsidized meal services, and credit card reward arbitrage in the 2010s—even as I made sure to direct my investment portfolio towards businesses that actually, you know, made money. So it is today: the tech industry has made a nigh-infinite number of GPUs available at remarkably low prices, and I'm just some dipshit customer who is more than happy to allow investors to subsidize my usage. At the moment, I'm paying $200/month for Claude Max which admittedly feels like a bit of a stretch, until I check ccusage and realize I've burned over $4500 worth of API tokens in the last 30 days.
And, unreliable and frustrating as they may be, I'm still seeing a ton of personal value from the current crop of LLM-based tools overall. As long as that's the case, I suppose I'll keep doing whatever best assists me in achieving my goals.
Is any of this sustainable? Unlikely. Are we all cooked? Probably! But as Brian says, this is a collective action problem. I'm not going to be the one to fix it. And while I greatly admire the spirit of those who would gladly spend years of their lives as activists to also not fix it, I've got other shit I'd rather do.
My only real medium-to-long-term hope is that the local LLM scene continues to mature and evolve so as to hedge the possibility that the AI cloud subsidy disappears and all these servers get turned off. So long as this class of tools continues to be available to those who buy fancy Apple products, how I personally approach software development will be forever changed.
(h/t to Tim Dussinger for reminding me to link to Brian's commentary.)