Snipp CEO Warns AI-Generated Code Creates New Technical Debt

CEO of Snipp Atul Sabharwal warns that artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the nature of technical debt. While traditional debt involved legacy code and obsolete hardware, Sabharwal argues that AI-generated code creates a new gap between what a system can do and the human ability to explain, govern, and safely modify it.

Sabharwal notes that while AI increases delivery throughput, it often leads to delivery instability and a reliance on unexamined code. This is supported by 2025 DORA research from Google, which associated higher AI adoption with increased instability, and a 2026 Sonar survey showing that 96% of developers do not fully trust AI-generated code. Additionally, IBM research found that 81% of executives believe technical debt constrains AI success.

Looking ahead, Sabharwal predicts that technical debt will evolve over the next twenty years from unexamined code into problematic dependencies on specific models and vendors. He warns this will eventually become a crisis of lost organizational judgment. To mitigate these risks, he advises leaders to implement clear human ownership of AI systems, maintain strict traceability of data and prompts, and adopt modular architectures to avoid vendor lock-in.