Cognitive Debt Is Not Technical Debt -- and Your AI Coding Tools Are Creating It

I work in AI deployment for enterprise. Over the past year I've watched the same pattern play out on every team that adopted AI coding tools. First two months: velocity is up, everyone's excited, PRs are flying. Month three or four: someone gets paged at 2 AM, opens the failing function, and realizes they have no idea what it does. They accepted it from Copilot three months ago and never traced the logic. The incident takes four hours instead of one. The postmortem says "root cause unclear." Nobody writes down what actually happened, which is that the team shipped code they didn't understand and got away with it until they didn't. We have a name for code you know is bad. Technical debt. You shipped something suboptimal, you know it's suboptimal, and you plan to fix it later. Fine. That's a conscious trade-off. We don't have a standard name for code you don't even know is bad. Code that works, passes tests, looks clean, and sits in production for months until it breaks in a way nobody c