Sidebar has named something real: the gap between code your team ships and code your team understands is not technical debt. It is cognitive debt, and it is worse.
Technical debt is measurable. You can count the workarounds, schedule the refactors, estimate the cost. Cognitive debt lives in the heads that have already left the building, in the systems that work but cannot be explained, in the onboarding docs nobody wrote.
The piece is short but the concept has weight. Read it to find out why the standard remedies for technical debt do not touch this problem, and what that means for teams scaling fast.
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