AI agents write code incredibly fast. They destroy software architecture even faster.
That's not a secret anymore. It has a name now — agentic technical debt — a stack of studies behind it, and a rough consensus: autonomous agents accumulate architectural debt faster than any review process can absorb it.
Drop a standard AI coding agent into a complex, legacy-integrated enterprise environment and you will get speed. But you pay for it — quietly breaking dependency-injection boundaries, coupling modules that were designed to stay independent, and seeding architectural drift that won't surface until the next major release.
The diagnosis is everywhere now. The fixes are arriving fast too. The question worth asking isn't whether agents drift — that's settled — but what a mechanism has to guarantee before you'd trust it with a regulated codebase.
I work on software in regulated domains — mixed C++, .NET Framework, native modules, where a defect outlives the sprint that shipped it. In environments like that, "lines of code generated" is the wrong thing to optimize. The right question is narrower and harder:
