It's so early game, is the real problem

> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases? Yes! And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not. Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

I have seen a bad hire having instant impact on team and after person was let go, team was still getting back on track to pre-hire productivity for another 3 months. We know all managers that say "stack doesn't matter, we can swap devs". We had C/C++ dev hired to do web dev with C# and Typescript. Guy was utterly incompatible even if he was smart but management wanted someone who is local and can come to the office and that was this guy selling point.

> My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. At least on greenfield projects, Fable is more like having an endless succession of fly-by senior devs who lock themselves in an office for a week, and who come back with very reasonable code that I then need to maintain somehow. For longer-term maintenance, I am actually slowly warming to Sonnet 4.5-era models (so October 2025, right before the Opus revolution). They need to be given clear instructions and watched carefully. But since they force a human to stay in the loop, you don't have the institutional knowledge loss I see in some Opus projects, or the code that was one-shot with no human interaction at all that's a constant temptation in Fable projects. And yeah, the bit rot is painfully real once the humans step back too far. I've been dealing with a compelling prototype that someone built, and that stakeholders love …