Why Autonomous Coding Agents Are Creating a Technical Debt Crisis

AI coding agents are rapidly accumulating technical debt as GitClear's analysis of 211M lines reveals—refactoring is declining while duplicated code climbs. This trend threatens long-term code maintainability and developer productivity. The author addresses this by integrating 20 years of tech-debt research into an agent-loop plugin that automatically tracks code shortcuts and architectural decisions, enabling developers to proactively manage and resolve accumulated debt using research-backed methods across Claude Code, Copilot, and other AI coding platforms.