One underappreciated aspect: the artifact surface area of an AI session grows much faster than the code surface area. For every hour of Claude Code output, you get not just code changes but screenshots, generated images, exported transcripts, spec drafts, downloaded model weights — all scattered across wherever Finder happened to drop them.

The maintenance cost argument applies here too. If you can't quickly navigate to the right artifact at the right moment, you end up re-generating things you already have, or worse, losing context between sessions. The "maintenance" of your working environment is a real tax on the ratio the article is describing.

I've been trying to address the file-side of this problem specifically, but the broader point stands: AI coding agents will only reduce net maintenance costs if the surrounding tooling (file management, context switching, artifact organization) keeps pace.