Frankly, I'm on the side of no tech/comprehension debt ever being paid down if you want to believe this idea is true.
The analogy of debt breaks when you can discard the program and start anew, probably at great cost to the company. But since that cost is externalized to developers, no developer is actually paying the debt because greenfield development is almost always more invigorating than maintaining legacy code. It's a bailout (really debt forgiveness) of technical debt by the company, who also happens to be paying the developers a good wage on the very nebulous promise that this won't happen again (spoiler: it will).
What developers need to do to get a bailout is enough reputation and soft skills to convince someone a rewrite is feasible and the best option. And leadership who is not completely convinced you should never rewrite programs from scratch.
Some programs still should not be rewritten: Excel, Word, many of the more popular and large programs. However many smaller/medium applications that are being maintained by developers using LLMs in this way will more easily have a larger fraction of LLM generated code that is harder to understand (again, if you believe the article). Where-as before you might have rewritten a small program, you might now rewrite a medium program.
The analogy of debt breaks when you can discard the program and start anew, probably at great cost to the company. But since that cost is externalized to developers, no developer is actually paying the debt because greenfield development is almost always more invigorating than maintaining legacy code. It's a bailout (really debt forgiveness) of technical debt by the company, who also happens to be paying the developers a good wage on the very nebulous promise that this won't happen again (spoiler: it will).
What developers need to do to get a bailout is enough reputation and soft skills to convince someone a rewrite is feasible and the best option. And leadership who is not completely convinced you should never rewrite programs from scratch.
Joel Spolsky's beliefs here are worth a revisit in the face of hastened code generation by LLMs too, as it was based completely on human-created code: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Some programs still should not be rewritten: Excel, Word, many of the more popular and large programs. However many smaller/medium applications that are being maintained by developers using LLMs in this way will more easily have a larger fraction of LLM generated code that is harder to understand (again, if you believe the article). Where-as before you might have rewritten a small program, you might now rewrite a medium program.