The Tech Debt Nobody Wrote Down

Short summary

The real threat from AI-generated code isn't buggy code but unrecorded decisions: agents silently defer choices (dozens per session) that nobody documents, creating reckless-and-inadvertent debt. Using Fowler's debt quadrant, the author argues the only solution is making debt visible—recording decisions in structured files the team can review later, before disaster strikes.

• •AI compounds technical debt not through poor code quality, but by making silent decisions no one records
• •The deadliest debt is Fowler's bottom-right quadrant: reckless *and* inadvertent—unknown and unmanaged
• •Solution: debt-ops automaton that logs each deferred decision to a repo file, moving debt from invisible to managed

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.