Comprehension debt: what it is and how to keep it small

Graphify has a guide to keeping comprehension debt small when agents write a lot of your code. The term means the gap between the code a team ships and the code it actually understands. It builds up one approved change at a time, so nothing looks wrong until someone has to change that code and finds what it was holding up.

The habits it suggests are old ones:

• Keep changes small, one per pull request.
• Have the agent write a plain summary of what changed and why before you read the code.
• Review for intent, not only lines.
• Use the agent to learn the code, not only to write it.

The guide also cites an Anthropic study of 52 engineers learning a new library. Those who used AI assistance scored 17% lower on a follow-up quiz (50% against 67%).

The last section covers how to see what a change touches before you merge. Graphify maps the functions, classes, and files in a repo and how they connect, so starting from a changed function shows its callers and callees, including ones in files nobody edited. Its hosted pull request review reads the diff alongside those callers and callees. To try it, you sign up, connect a repository, and open a pull request.