As we dug deeper, however, a different problem emerged. No one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made, or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the deeper issue was that the team’s shared understanding, the theory of the system, had quietly fragmented. They had also failed to write down or communicate the rationale behind decisions. They had accumulated cognitive and intent debt faster than technical debt, and it had paralyzed them.

Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you never wrote - the goals, constraints and rationale that explain why the system is the way it is. It’s the one kind of debt your agents can’t pay down for you, and the one agentic engineering makes most expensive.