I'm sorry to be blunt here, but the fact you're looking at idiotic use of Claude.md system prompts tells me you're not actually looking at the most productive users, and your opinion doesn't even cover 'where we are'.
I don't blame people who think this. I've stopped visiting Ai Subreddits because the average comment and post is just terrible, with some straight up delusional.
But broadly speaking - in my experience - either you have your documentation set up correctly and cleanly such that a new junior hire could come in and build or fix something in a few days without too many questions. Or you don't. That same distinction seems to cut between teams who get the most out of AI and those that insist everybody must be losing more time than it costs.
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I suspect we could even flip it around: the cost it takes to get an AI functioning in your code base is a good proxy for technical debt.
I don't blame people who think this. I've stopped visiting Ai Subreddits because the average comment and post is just terrible, with some straight up delusional.
But broadly speaking - in my experience - either you have your documentation set up correctly and cleanly such that a new junior hire could come in and build or fix something in a few days without too many questions. Or you don't. That same distinction seems to cut between teams who get the most out of AI and those that insist everybody must be losing more time than it costs.
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I suspect we could even flip it around: the cost it takes to get an AI functioning in your code base is a good proxy for technical debt.