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

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: 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.