418: Why AI-Generated Code Hurts Your Exit

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. We are living through a fascinating moment in software development right now. I am certainly. Like, I enjoy using AI coding tools that build features much faster than ever before. These things can scan my entire code base. The context windows are just big enough now. They spot things that I miss and they implement changes that I want them to implement across dozens of files in seconds. It's pretty much incredible. But there's something we need to talk about here in all this positive perspective. There's something that's quietly accumulating in our projects right now while we marvel at how quickly we can ship these features. And that is called comprehension debt, and that's what I'm gonna talk about today. A quick word here from our sponsor, paddle.com. I use Paddle as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They take care of stuff like taxes, currencies, and tracking the client transactions. They even update credit cards in the background, like, for our customers if they expire and then have to be re updated so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors, not banks or financial regulators. I can just focus on serving my customers. If you think you would rather just build your product, well, do check out paddle.com as your merchant of record payment provider. Now, comprehension debt. I think it's something just like technical debt, but it is also fundamentally different. Like, conceptually, it falls into the same category. Technical debt is about choices that developers consciously make in a certain moment to then defer work until a later stage of the business. Right? You know, you're taking a shortcut, you build something that, you know, you will have to come back and fix at some point, but you do it anyway because you know I'll get to it when and if there is time in the future. Right? A business that is trying to build a perfect piece of software is never gonna finish because everything in the world changes all the time. So you are good with what you have and then you say, I'll come back later and fix it. That's traditional technical debt. But comprehension debt, that is something that I didn't realize until a couple weeks ago existed, is different. It's when we don't comprehend. We don't understand what the system does anymore. We don't understand it because we never built the understanding in the first place. That is happening more and more with AI generated code. Let me get back to where this comes from. There's this concept that I came across from Peter Nauer, the mathematician behind the Backus Nauer Forum, which if you ever studied computer science academically, you will have been annoyed by at some point. But not only did he invent interesting math, he also wrote a paper about theory building. The idea here is that code implodes when the team that has …