New Jun 5, 2026

The Intent Debt

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Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may have never wrote: the goals, constraints, and rationale for why the system is the way it is. If you're lucky, some of this exists scattered in team documents or discussions, but it's likely incomplete. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and agentic engineering makes it the most expensive.

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