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Comprehension debt

What Is Comprehension Debt?

In short

Comprehension debt is the growing gap between how fast AI-assisted work changes and how well the people responsible for it understand it. It does not break anything straight away. It raises the cost and risk of every later decision, because each one starts further from a reliable picture of the system.

Updated 24 September 20261 min read

How is comprehension debt different from technical debt?#

Technical debt is a property of the system. Comprehension debt is a property of the relationship between the system and the people accountable for it. The code can be clean and the debt still large, if the people who own it no longer know why it is the way it is.

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Who else has described this?#

Margaret-Anne Storey's "cognitive debt" and Addy Osmani's "comprehension debt" describe related gaps in teams and codebases. The common observation is that understanding used to arrive as a by-product of doing the work, and that when the work is delegated the understanding stops arriving with it.

Paying it down is what state reconstruction and the re-entry brief are for: deliberately rebuilding a picture that no longer assembles itself.

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