From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI (opens in new tab)

arXiv:2603.22106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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: tech...