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Diff Debt: Why Unread AI-Generated Code Is a Hidden Risk Beyond Technical Debt

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Software developer and writer introduced the term 'diff debt' to describe code that enters a codebase without anyone truly understanding it — distinct from technical debt, where developers knowingly choose shortcuts. Technical debt, coined by Ward Cunningham in the early 1990s, implies the author understands what was shipped and can plan to fix it later. Diff debt, by contrast, arises when pull requests are approved without being genuinely read, often because AI-generated code looks clean and passes tests but was never mentally modeled by any human. The rise of AI coding tools has widened this gap, since generating hundreds of lines of code now takes seconds while thorough code review has not become any faster. Unlike technical debt, diff debt is invisible on any project backlog and only surfaces when something breaks and no one on the team can explain the code.

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