I'm so glad someone has finally described the phenomena so well. "Comprehension debt" is a perfect description for the thing I've been the most concerned about

I'm so glad someone has finally described the phenomena so well. "Comprehension debt" is a perfect description for the thing I've been the most concerned about with AI coding. One I got past the Dunning-Kruger phase and started really looking at what was being generated, I ran into this comprehension issue. With a human, even a very junior one, you can sort of "get in the developer's head". You can tell which team member wrote which code and what they were thinking at the time. This leads to a narrative, or story of execution which is mostly comprehensible. With the AI stuff, it's just stochastic parrot stuff. It may work just fine, but there will be things like random functions that are never called, hundreds or thousands of lines of extra code to do very simple things. References to things that don't exist, and never have. I know this stuff can exist in human code bases too - but generally I can reason about why. "Oh, this was taken out for this issue and the dev forgot to delete it". I can track it, even if it's poor quality. With the AI stuff, it's just randomly there. No idea why, if it is used, was ever used, makes sense, is extra fluff or brilliant. It takes a lot of work to figure out.