Architectural drift is the silent tax on AI-assisted development

Dev.to AI
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The dirty secret of shipping with AI coding agents: every PR is locally optimal and globally chaotic. A function moves. A pattern gets reinvented two directories over. A decision someone made six weeks ago in Slack quietly stops being load-bearing - until it isn't, and you can't tell why the thing breaks. This is architectural drift. It compounds. The larger the team or the longer the project, the it costs.