diff debt (n.) — the accumulated risk of merging AI-generated diffs that no human has actually read.
I shipped code I've never read. So did you.
Here's a confession. A few months ago I built a desktop automation bot called Erci — GUI, computer vision, license system, the whole thing. It works. People use it. And I have never truly read most of its code.
I'm not even a professional developer. I described what I wanted to an AI assistant, it produced the code, I ran it, and when it worked, I moved on. Thousands of lines accumulated this way. The bot is great — until something breaks in a module I've technically "owned" for months, and I open the file and realize I'm reading it for the first time.
If you're a professional developer, your version of this story is more subtle but structurally identical: the agent produces a plausible 900-line diff, the checks are green, the sprint is on fire, you skim, you approve, you merge. The pull request looked perfect. That's exactly the problem — it looked perfect.
