The Quality Erosion

#ai #softwareengineering #codequality #tech

Beta Stories — Episode 05

In 2023, Klarna replaced 700 customer support agents with AI. Costs down 25%. Efficiency up. Shareholders delighted.

In 2025, Klarna's CEO told Fortune they "went too far" and started rehiring humans. Quite the arc.

The Promise

AI would handle the repetitive work so humans could focus on the complex. Support would be faster. Content would scale. Code would write itself. Costs would drop and quality would rise. Both. Simultaneously. Marvellous.

The Decay

Gartner surveyed 5,728 customers: 64% prefer companies that do not use AI in customer service. Five9 found 81% would rather wait for a human than interact with AI immediately. The product got faster. The customers got unhappier.

Google launched AI Overviews. It recommended gluing cheese to pizza and eating rocks for minerals. Result: 46% fewer clicks on search results. The world's largest information product became measurably less reliable.

CNET published 77 AI-generated articles. 53% required corrections. Wikipedia downgraded CNET as a reliable source. A publication built over decades of credibility, eroded in months.

Adobe Stock: 48% of images now AI-generated, up from 2.5% in 2023. GitClear analysed 211 million lines of code and found AI-assisted code has 41% higher churn rate. LinkedIn reports 54% of long-form posts are now AI-generated. They receive 30% less reach. One begins to notice a pattern.

The Mechanism

AI did not cause this. Cost-cutting did. AI is the instrument.

Companies replaced experienced humans with AI, kept prices identical, and pocketed the margin. The customer receives a cheaper product at the same price. That is not innovation. That is extraction.

METR ran a randomised controlled trial with experienced developers. Those using AI tools were 19% slower. Not faster. Slower. The assumption that AI improves output was never validated. It was budgeted.

AI amplifies what is already there. Companies that valued quality use AI to enhance it. Companies that valued margins use AI to cut deeper. The tool is neutral. The incentive is not.