AI-led technical debt payoff for faster, steadier quality Mipro’s technical debt wasn’t getting paid down enough. The work was mundane, time‑consuming, and easy to postpone amid feature delivery. At the same time, technical debt causes significant cognitive load to developer teams.
To change that, Mipro put a NorthCode concept into action: AI Colleague. It takes on routine technical‑debt cleanup by itself and turns prioritized items into actionable code changes in a steady, structured flow. AI Colleague turned technical debt cleanup into a steady, reliable stream of improvements without sacrificing quality. It can handle even complex refactoring scenarios, but stays firmly under human supervision. Engineers can guide the outcome, decide what to accept, and what ships.
To protect quality, AI Colleague includes comprehensive AI guardrails: changes are constrained by clear scope and policy, validated through verification steps and consistency checks, and always require human review before release. With AI Colleague, Mipro gained a digital workmate who tirelessly maintains legacy code.
The benefits are concrete:
- Less manual triage and bookkeeping around technical debt and priorities.
- Faster turnaround from “issue detected” to “fix prepared”
- Reduced effort for recurring patterns (cleanup, best‑practice fixes, consistency changes).
- More uninterrupted engineering time for feature work, while code quality improves continuously, decreasing cognitive load.
