Data Structures and Algorithms

    

The Illusion of Competence: Defining "Epistemic Debt" in the Era of LLM-Assisted Software Engineering

Authors: Ludovic Ngabang

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the software development lifecycle represents a shift from constructive programming to curated programming. While current metrics focus on productivity gains and syntactical correctness, this paper argues that these metrics are insufficient to capture the long-term systemic risks introduced by AI.We propose the concept of Epistemic Debt: the divergence between the complexity of a software system and the developer’s cognitive model of that system. Unlike traditional Technical Debt, which is often a conscious trade-off, Epistemic Debt is an invisible accumulation of "unearned" code that functions correctly but lacks ahuman owner who understands its causality. This paper provides a theoretical framework for this phenomenon, classifies the specific rchitectural erosions caused by stochastic code generation, and proposes a "Cognitive Ratchet" methodology to mitigate the collapse of maintainability.

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[v1] 2026-01-04 00:50:35

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