The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering. There’s a cost that doesn’t show up in your velocity metrics when teams go deep on AI coding tools. Especially when its tedious to review all the code the AI generates. This cost accumulates steadily, and eventually it has to be paid—with interest. It’s called comprehension debt or  cognitive debt. Comprehension debt is the  growing gap  between how much code exists in your system and  how much of it any human being genuinely understands . Unlike technical debt, which announces itself through mounting friction—slow builds, tangled dependencies, the creeping dread every time you touch that one module—comprehension debt breeds false confidence. The codebase looks clean.…