Jason Gorman explaing the challenge of comprehension debt with AI generated code.
When teams produce code faster than they can understand it, it creates what I’ve been calling “comprehension debt”. If the software gets used, then the odds are high that at some point that generated code will need to change. The “A.I.” boosters will say “We can just get the tool to do that”. And that might work maybe 70% of the time.
But those of us who’ve experimented a lot with using LLMs for code generation and modification know that there will be times when the tool just won’t be able to do it.
“Doom loops”, when we go round and round in circles trying to get an LLM, or a bunch of different LLMs, to fix a problem that it just doesn’t seem to be able to, are an everyday experience using this technology. Anyone claiming it doesn’t happen to them has either been extremely lucky, or is fibbing.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be many times when we have to edit the code ourselves. The “comprehension debt” is the extra time it’s going to take us to understand it first.
And we’re sitting on a rapidly growing mountain of it.
On a very similar note, Steve Krouse explains how vibe code is legacy code because nobody understands it.
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