Google engineer Addy Osmani coined the term comprehension debt to describe the growing gap between how much code exists in a system and how much of it any human being genuinely understands. Unlike traditional technical debt, which announces itself through friction, slow builds, and tangled dependencies, comprehension debt breeds false confidence. The codebase looks clean. The tests pass. The velocity metrics look excellent. And then, one day, the team discovers they can no longer safely modify their own system.
As an AI assisted developer, I concur. (via The AI Technical Debt Crisis: Why the Fastest Codebases in 2026 Are Becoming the Most Fragile Blog | RocketDevs)










