AddyOsmani.com - Comprehension Debt

Comprehension debt: the gap between how much code exists and how much of it the team actually understands. AI tools make this worse quietly -- the code looks clean, the tests pass, but nobody knows how it works. An Anthropic study found engineers using AI assistance scored 17% lower on comprehension quizzes, with debugging skills hit hardest. The deeper problem: AI generates code faster than humans can review it, breaking the old feedback loop where code review forced knowledge to spread. Senior engineers used to review faster than juniors could write. That's now inverted.

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