yasirlatif

The "intent debt" framing is the most underappreciated category here. Cognitive and technical debt are at least visible in the code. Intent debt is invisible — it only surfaces when someone makes a change that's locally reasonable but globally wrong because the original constraint no longer exists in any artifact. The hardest version of this is in enterprise systems where the constraint was a regulatory requirement that quietly changed three years ago, but nobody updated the code because the tests still passed. You can't recover intent from a test suite.