ON COGNITIVE DEBT

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Cognitive debt is the idea that AI-generated codebases are at risk of falling into a state where nobody knows how they work, leaving them inextensible, unobservable, and hard to debug. This is already happening in AI-driven codebases. However, when controlling for the size and scope of a project, cognitive debt tends to be at least as bad, if not worse, in pre-AI code bases than in AI code bases. This fact is obscured because a lot of traditional engineering work is either managing crippling cognitive debt or avoiding it at enormous cost. The best AI users are already pretty good at avoiding cognitive debt, and they're only going to get better at it.