AI Pilots Are Quietly Piling Up Technical Debt for Tomorrow
DavidLinthicum · x · 2026-09-23
Using a pseudonymous company 'Northbridge' as an example, the author describes how a successful generative AI contract-summarizing pilot spawned 27 variants across legal, finance and compliance within a year—each with its own prompts, data sources, access rules and failure modes. After a model upgrade, nobody knew which workflows were affected; hallucinations couldn't be traced to the model, prompt, retrieval layer or source document.
The author notes this repeats a pattern he has watched for 35 years across client-server, web, SOA and cloud—now happening with AI, only faster. The warning: ungoverned early wins quickly become maintenance liabilities.
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