The Intent Debt: The One Debt AI Agents Can't Pay Down for You

Addy Osmani expands on the 'Triple Debt Model' by defining intent debt: the absence of externalized rationale, goals, and constraints explaining why a system exists as it does. Unlike technical debt, which AI agents can refactor, or cognitive debt, which they can explain, intent debt requires human authorship—agents can only fabricate plausible but potentially wrong reasons for design choices. As teams adopt agentic engineering, every unwritten decision becomes a recurring tax, because agents start each session without institutional memory and will confidently guess at missing context. Osmani argues for treating intent as a first-class artifact through specs, AGENTS.md files, and architecture records that capture the 'why' behind load-bearing decisions.