👥 Team Debt

Team Debt: The social and cultural cost of AI-assisted development. It manifests as the erosion of human engineering capability, impossible knowledge transfer, skill atrophy, and the "Missing Middle" phenomenon where junior developers cannot become seniors.

Characteristics

  • Onboarding Failure: New developers take 2 months instead of 2 weeks to understand the code.
  • Skill Atrophy: Senior developers lose their ability to debug without AI; juniors never learn fundamentals.
  • Team Fragmentation: Different developers use conflicting AI strategies, creating "Code Style Wars."
  • Bus Factor < 1: No single human (or team) understands the whole system.
  • Cognitive Burnout: Seniors are exhausted by the load of reviewing massive amounts of synthetic code.

The Great Bifurcation

16.3%
drop in junior developer job postings
Source: Source 2
3-5x
longer to understand AI codebases
Source: Research
10x
increase in cognitive load for reviewers
Source: Ch 9

AI is hollowing out the "middle class" of software engineering. The roles where people used to learn—writing boilerplate, fixing small bugs—are being automated, leaving no clear path for junior growth.

Examples

1. The Onboarding Wall

A new senior dev joins a project built with Vibe Coding. They find the code so opaque and undocumented that they quit after three weeks, realizing they can't be productive.

2. The Skill Gap

A junior developer implementation works perfectly via a prompt, but when asked to optimize it for memory usage, they have no idea where to start because they don't understand the underlying algorithm.

3. Review Exhaustion

The lead architect receives 10 Pull Requests, each containing 500 lines of AI-generated logic. They "rubber-stamp" the reviews because they don't have 20 hours to read it all.

Remediation Strategies

  1. Standardize Methodology: Adopt Clean Vibe Coding as a team-wide standard.
  2. Pair Programming (Human+AI): Use AI as a tool for pair thinking, not just typing.
  3. The "Explain Rule": PR authors must explain the internal logic to the team before merging.
  4. Deliberate Skill Building: Dedicate time for juniors to solve problems without AI to build tacit knowledge.

Related Vibe-Code Smells

Book Reference

The human cost of AI is the focus of:

  • Primary: Prologue, Chapter 9, Chapter 12.
  • Remediation: Chapter 16: Clean Teams.
  • Appendix A: Full debt catalog.

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