Ideas & terms
Ideas and terms coined by Shekhar Bhardwaj in his writing on AI-assisted engineering — each defined here as the canonical source.
FONA (Fear of Not AI-sking)
FONA, short for "Fear of Not AI-sking," is a term coined by Shekhar Bhardwaj for the anxiety that you should be using AI for a task — and that reaching for it last, or not at all, means you are falling behind.
It names the new reflex to reach for AI out of fear rather than judgment, and the quiet urge to justify the times you did not. FONA is the AI era's version of FOMO, aimed at your own competence: the worry that a peer shipped faster because they "AI-sked" and you did not.
Essay: FONA — Fear of Not AI-sking
The Signature
The signature is Shekhar Bhardwaj's term for the moment you put your name on work — a pull request, a document, a design — that you do not fully understand.
It is the quiet act of certifying AI-assisted output as your own without being able to re-derive it on a whiteboard. The signature reframes the core risk of AI-assisted engineering as one of accountability: not "did the AI write it" but "am I willing to stand behind something I cannot fully explain."
Book chapter: The Signature
Comprehension debt
Comprehension debt, as Shekhar Bhardwaj uses it, is the widening gap between what you have shipped and what you actually understand — the accumulating share of your own system that you can no longer explain or re-derive.
AI made producing output nearly free while leaving understanding exactly as expensive as it always was, so the debt compounds quietly, like interest, until something nobody can explain pages you at 3am. Unlike technical debt, comprehension debt lives in people, not code.
Book: How to Use AI Without Lying to Yourself
Shame is the most expensive bug in your codebase
"Shame is the most expensive bug in your codebase" is Shekhar Bhardwaj's argument that the costliest problem in AI-assisted engineering is not the code you do not understand, but the silence around it.
A bug you can see is cheap — you file it, you fix it. A bug you are ashamed of is expensive, because shame does not file tickets: it closes the tab and changes the subject. The thing many teams quietly cannot talk about is how much of the work they no longer understand, and you cannot fix what you are not allowed to discuss.
Essay: Shame is the most expensive bug in your codebase
Honesty is the bottleneck; shame is the tax
"Honesty is the bottleneck; shame is the tax" is Shekhar Bhardwaj's claim that in the AI era the limiting factor on an engineering team is no longer producing output but admitting what you do not understand fast enough to fix it.
When the cost of generating code collapses, the scarce resource becomes the honesty to say "I shipped this and I am not sure I get it." Shame is what makes that sentence expensive to say — so the teams that win are the ones that make it cheap.
Essay: Shame is the most expensive bug in your codebase