From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI
2026/03/23 by Margaret-Anne Storey · 14 voices · 1 citation
#cs.SE
paper · pdf
Abstract
Generative AI is accelerating software development, but may quietly shift where the most significant risks lie. As AI generates code faster than teams can understand it, two under appreciated forms of debt accumulate: cognitive debt, the erosion of shared understanding across a team, and intent debt, the absence of externalized rationale that developers and AI agents need to work safely with code. This article proposes a Triple Debt Model for reasoning about software health, built around three interacting debt types: technical debt in code, cognitive debt in people, and intent debt in externalized knowledge. Cognitive debt is a team-level, project-level property reflecting the erosion of shared understanding across a software system over time, leading to increasingly inadequate shared mental models for reasoning about and safely changing the system. Intent debt refers to the absence or erosion of explicit rationale, goals, and constraints that guide how humans and agents evolve the system. We discuss how generative AI changes the relative importance of these debt types, how each can be diagnosed and mitigated, and surface points of debate for practitioners.
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- Jo, tohle už dostalo dokonce název — Cognitive Debt — arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106 1997: Záměrně jsem použil — protože umím napsat dokonce všechny tři —, –, - no a taky umím a české „uvozovky“, pro [bsky, 6 points, 1 comments]
- From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI [lobsters, 3 points, 0 comments]
- On a related topic, there’s this academic paper about cognitive and intent debt which I found interesting arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106 (Issues related to « intent debt » in creative endeavours like games [bsky, 2 points, 1 comments]
- Paper: "From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI" arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106 Blog: margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- Luego estaría todo este asunto de las deudas que se generan, que sería tanto o similar a las identificadas para el software en este otro artículo: deuda de intención, técnica y cognitiva. arxiv.org/ab [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- 技術的負債、認知的負債、意図的負債 From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI https://lobste.rs/s/v5ccac #pdf #cogsci #vibecoding [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Link to the full paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.22106 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Luego estaría todo este asunto de las deudas que se generan, que sería tanto o similar a las identificadas para el software en este otro artículo: deuda de intención, técnica y cognitiva. https://arxi [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- For those working on #software teams that have infinite #AI spend, this article is worth a read arxiv.org/pdf/2603.22106 Don't let AI degrade your teams shared mental model of the domain. [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- This paper by Margaret-Anne Storey is the most important thing I've read about the field of software engineering in years. arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- "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 [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]
- Teams use coding agents to produce clean, tested, well‑architected code, yet they often don't understand it. I've seen high‑velocity projects where developers can't explain the system where small chan [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]
- From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI arxiv.org/abs/2603.22106 [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]
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