Faster Code, Deeper Debt? A Multivocal Literature Review on Technical Debt and Its Early Signs in LLM-Assisted Software Development (opens in new tab)

With the rapid adoption of LLM-assisted coding, the need to manage the technical debt these systems introduce has become urgent. In this paper, we conduct a multivocal literature review of 104 sources (31 formal, 73 grey) to examine how LLM-assisted development contributes to technical debt and what strategies, metrics, and benchmarks exist to mitigate it. We find that LLMs often amplify traditional forms of technical debt, particularly code, de...