Bug Backlogs Are Dying

The Magic Healing Wand

Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine you work in a hospital, and somebody hands you a magic healing wand. Point it at a patient, wave it around a bit, and they're healed. Broken leg? Healed. Mystery rash? Gone. That weird thing with the elbow? Sorted.

Now: would you still run a triage station?

I don't mean would you still assess patients. Of course you would. But would you maintain an elaborate prioritisation system? Would you keep a backlog of injuries ranked by severity, with a weekly meeting to re-evaluate whether that sprained ankle has become more urgent than last Tuesday's concussion? Would you have a product manager arguing that the broken femur in bed 7 is actually a P2 because the patient isn't a key account?

No. You'd just heal everyone. Obviously.

The Backlog We All Pretend Is Fine

I've been building software for over 20 years now, and I've spent an embarrassing number of hours in bug triage meetings. You know the ones. A room full of smart people debating whether a bug is a P1 or a P2. Whether it's "cosmetic" or "functional." Whether "works as designed" is a legitimate resolution or just a polite way of saying "we can't be bothered."

Every engineering organisation I've ever worked in (including my decade at Google) has had some version of the bug backlog. A sprawling, ever-growing list of known issues that everyone agrees should be fixed, and nobody ever fixes. The backlog becomes this strange cultural artefact. It's simultaneously the team's conscience and its graveyard. Bugs go in. They almost never come out.

And we just... accepted this. We built entire processes around managing the debt rather than paying it off. We invented labels and priorities and SLAs and quarterly bug bashes. All of it sophisticated infrastructure for not fixing things.

The reason was obvious and rational: fixing bugs takes time, time is finite, and there's always a feature someone wants more. So you triage. You prioritise. You let the P3s and P4s quietly rot.

What Changes When Fixing Is Cheap

What's changed is simple: fixing bugs is getting cheaper. Fast.

I'm not talking about some theoretical future. I'm talking about right now. I've watched engineers drop a stack trace into Claude and get back a pinpointed diagnosis with two candidate fixes — including the trade-offs between them — in under a minute. Not a suggestion to "check the logs." An actual fix. With context about why it broke and what the downstream implications are.

When I'm working in Claude Code, I regularly fix bugs that would have taken me an hour of investigation in ten minutes. Sometimes five. And I don't mean trivial bugs. I mean the gnarly ones: race conditions, subtle state management issues, that weird thing where it only breaks on the second request after a deployment. The stuff that used to sit in the backlog for months because nobody could justify the investigation time.

So if fixing a bug now costs roughly the same as triaging it (reading the report, reproducing it, classifying it, assigning a priority, debating that priority in a meeting) then why are we still triaging?

Just Fix It

I think the answer, for a growing number of teams, is: we shouldn't be.

The new workflow looks something like this: a bug comes in, you fix it. That's it. No backlog. No priority labels. No quarterly review of ageing tickets. You encounter a bug, you paste it into your AI tool of choice, you review the fix, you ship it. The whole cycle — from report to production — takes less time than the old triage meeting.

(Before anyone has a conniption: yes, you still review the fix. Yes, you still run your tests. I wrote about this in Correctness Over Determinism. The point is that you verify correctness, not that you skip verification entirely. The AI proposes, you validate, the tests confirm. That loop is fast.)

Speed matters, but there's a bigger payoff. Think about what happens to your codebase when you stop accumulating known defects. Every unfixed bug is a red herring for the next engineer debugging something nearby, and a small but real drag on morale. Nobody enjoys working in a codebase with 400 known bugs.

Fix them as they arrive and you get a cleaner codebase, happier engineers, and (here's the bit that should get the business people excited) happier users.

The Triage Objection

I can hear the objection already: "But resources are still finite! Even with AI, you can't fix everything instantly. Someone still needs to decide what to work on."

Fair enough. But I'd argue the constraint has shifted. It's no longer "we can't afford to fix this bug." It's "do we have enough AI compute to process this fix right now." And that constraint is getting cheaper by the month. The companies on our directory that are giving their engineers unlimited tokens? They're the ones where bug backlogs are already starting to disappear.

There will always be genuinely hard bugs that need deep architectural thought. I'm not suggesting AI fixes everything with zero human involvement. But the distribution has changed. If 80% of your backlog is stuff that an AI-assisted engineer can fix in ten minutes, then your backlog should be 80% smaller. The remaining 20%, the truly complex architectural issues, is a manageable list, not a soul-crushing spreadsheet.

We built bug backlogs because fixing was expensive and time was scarce. Those constraints are dissolving. The organisations that recognise this early will ship better software, attract better engineers, and move faster than the ones still scheduling their monthly triage ceremonies.

The magic healing wand is here. Stop triaging. Start healing.