Sue SmithMar 29

"The code might have been messy,
but the deeper issue was that the team's shared understanding, the theory of the system, had quietly fragmented."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106

From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI

Over time, the shared understanding that makes a software system safe to change quietly erodes. This gradual loss of understanding across a team increases cognitive debt, while the loss of captured rationale leads to intent debt. These may become more important, than technical debt in AI-assisted software development. This article proposes a triple debt model to reason about software health. It is built around three interacting debt types: technical debt in code, cognitive debt in people, and intent debt in externalized knowledge. Cognitive debt concerns what people understand; intent debt concerns what is explicitly captured for both people and machines to use in the future.

arXiv.org
Show thread64 Islands Aroha CooperativeMar 29

@sue oooh, good find!

they summarise intent debt as "the absence of externalized rationale" -- i think it's what i see as the 'million monkeys' problem: code is seemingly being written by multiple developers who are not on your team, which makes it so much harder to review, yeah, because you don't know what their intent was and you can't hope for an accurate answer if you ask

Show threadSue SmithMar 30
@airshipper Yeah I found the framing of the different types of debt in this helpful! I do wonder if debt is the right word for any of this mind you.
Show thread64 Islands Aroha CooperativeMar 30
@sue i was going to say, "well if its something the businesspeople understand" but they've never cared too much about tech debt
Show threadSue Smith
@airshipper yeah fair, it needs to be parseable in a way that "engaging with the complexity of long and short term tradeoffs" probably isn't 🤣
Mar 30 at 5:35pmWeb