A new kind of technical debt we're not talking about
Originally published on Impl — Jaroslaw Michalik's newsletter on engineering, AI, and building software that lasts.
The technical debt checklist most teams use was written for human-authored code: duplicated logic, missing tests, brittle dependencies. Coding agents produce a different kind — patterns that look consistent on the surface but were generated independently, session by session, with no shared mental model holding them together. It doesn't trip the usual linters, and it doesn't show up until someone tries to reason about the system as a whole.