Technical debt is about the code. Cognitive debt is about the team. Intent debt is about the reason.
Storey (arXiv:2603.22106) introduces a triple debt model for software health in the age of AI-generated code. Technical debt — the original metaphor — captures structural shortcuts that accumulate interest. Cognitive debt extends this to the team's shared understanding: when code changes faster than the team can comprehend it, the gap between what exists and what the team knows about it widens. Intent debt extends further: the missing externalized rationale for why decisions were made — documentation needed by both humans and AI tools to maintain the codebase.
The AI acceleration makes all three debts worse simultaneously. Generative AI produces code faster than teams can understand it (cognitive debt). The generated code lacks the reasoning that led to its structure (intent debt). And the code itself may contain structural shortcuts that the AI copied from training data (technical debt). Each debt type compounds the others: intent debt makes cognitive debt harder to resolve (you can't understand code whose rationale is absent), and cognitive debt makes technical debt invisible (you can't fix what you don't understand).
The distinction between cognitive and intent debt is the novel contribution. Previous frameworks treated “understanding” as a single dimension. Storey separates what people comprehend (cognitive state) from what is explicitly documented for human and machine use (externalized intent). A team member might understand the code perfectly but never write down why a particular approach was chosen. When they leave, the intent vanishes. The code remains but the rationale doesn't.
In AI-augmented development, intent debt becomes critical because the AI also needs the rationale. Code assistants that suggest changes without understanding why the original code was written that way introduce modifications that are locally correct but globally incoherent. The intent was never in the code — it was in the developer's head — and now neither the human successor nor the AI tool can access it.