The Hidden Cost of AI-Assisted Coding: When Your Codebase Becomes a Black Box

There's a specific kind of technical debt that doesn't show up in your linter, doesn't trigger a failing test, and doesn't announce itself until the third sprint — when you need to change something the AI wrote and realize you have no idea how it actually works. I've started calling it AI opacity debt , and I think it's becoming one of the bigger hidden costs of building with AI assistants. The Pattern You're building fast. Claude or Copilot writes a chunk of logic. It works. Tests pass. You shi