Technical debt
A metaphor: taking a shortcut now is like borrowing. You get the feature sooner, and then you pay interest on every later change until you pay it back.
An agent can borrow faster than any person, and it pays interest in a new way: it rereads the mess each session, in tokens and in wrong turns. It can also repay cheaply, which changes the sums, so cleaning up may now be worth doing far more often.
Say it to your agent
“Don't pay this down in general. List the three places that slowed our last five changes, with commit links, and fix only the worst one. Then set up a weekly agent that opens one small clean-up pull request.”