Technical Debt is Social; it is the Price of Learning by Doing

Ben Linders — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 11:05:00 GMT

Technical debt is not necessarily a sign of poor engineering. It can be the price of learning through software in use. As AI accelerates code production beyond our capacity to understand code and context, technical debt increasingly becomes a sociotechnical challenge.

By Ben Linders

Google Finds That Technical Debt Can Derail Coding Agents through "Agent Distraction"

Sergio De Simone — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 18:00:00 GMT

In a recent article, Google senior staff software engineer Sam Saccone and senior staff data scientist Madhuri Garikapati highlighted the cost of agent distraction, where AI coding agents get derailed by stale technical debt, such as old TODO comments, obsolete bug references, and outdated specs, leading them to embark on unrequested "side-quests".

By Sergio De Simone

InfoQ - Technical Debt

Technical Debt is Social; it is the Price of Learning by Doing

Google Finds That Technical Debt Can Derail Coding Agents through "Agent Distraction"