You Accumulate Technical Debt When You Skip Code Review. Here's What You Accumulate When You Skip the Human.

You Accumulate Technical Debt When You Skip Code Review. Here's What You Accumulate When You Skip the Human.

There's a concept in software engineering called Technical Debt. You skip the right abstraction, move fast, ship. Someday you pay it back in refactoring hours.

I've been thinking about a different kind of debt. One that doesn't show up in your codebase.

Human Debt: When you build with AI as your only collaborator, you remove the one thing that makes you feel obligated to show up. Not accountability in the corporate sense — the simpler thing. Someone is reading your work. You don't want to waste their time.

That's not a productivity hack. It's closer to a structural property of how humans behave when observed.