AI coding does not make technical debt disappear.
It changes the way technical debt charges interest.
Before AI-assisted delivery, the cost of technical debt showed up as slow onboarding, fragile releases, confusing ownership, duplicated work, and long debugging sessions. Those costs still exist. But there is now another layer: every AI agent that touches a messy repository has to spend more context, more tool calls, more retries, and more validation effort just to understand what the system is supposed to do.
That is the token tax of technical debt.
The model provider does not charge a separate "technical debt fee." The bill shows up indirectly. More unclear code means more prompt context. More brittle boundaries mean more code search. More missing tests mean more explanation and manual verification. More duplicated logic means more repeated reasoning.
