You shipped 50 features last month. How many can you actually explain?

There's a type of debt accumulating in AI-assisted codebases that nobody's tracking. It doesn't show up in sprint boards. It doesn't trigger linter warnings. It compounds silently until something breaks and you're staring at your own code like it was written by a stranger.

Because functionally, it was.

A Reddit thread recently called this "the payday loan of technical debt." That might be underselling it.

Here's what's actually happening and what you can do about it.