I'm not taking a "zero technical debt" stance. Every successful startup eventually ends up treating their 1.0 codebase as a legacy burden. That's the cost of doing business, but it is a real cost. If Anthropic could have kept their code quality high with a few clever tricks and a few extra tokens, surely they would have.

So I take this whole episode as confirmation that code which is subject to high-velocity low-supervision work by agents decays quickly even under ideal circumstances.