GoKawiilMartin Fowler: 02 Apr 2026
As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health:
Technical debt lives in code. It accumulates when implementation decisions compromise future changeability. It limits how systems can change.
Cognitive debt lives in people. It accumulates when shared understanding of the system erodes faster than it is replenished. It limits how teams can reason about change.
Intent debt lives in artifacts. It accumulates when the goals and constraints that should guide the system are poorly captured or maintained. It limits whether the system continues to reflect what we meant to build and it limits how humans and AI agents can continue to evolve the system effectively.
While I’m getting a bit bemused by debt metaphor proliferation, this way of thinking does make a fair bit of sense. The article includes useful sections to diagnose and mitigate each kind of debt. The three interact with each other, and the article outlines some general activities teams should do to keep it all under control
❄ ❄
In the article she references a recent paper by Shaw and Nave at the Wharton School that adds LLMs to Kahneman’s two-system model of thinking.
Kahneman’s book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, is one of my favorite books. Its central idea is that humans have two systems of cognition. System 1 (intuition) makes rapid decisions, often barely-consciously. System 2 (deliberation) is when we apply deliberate thinking to a problem. He observed that to save energy we default to intuition, and that sometimes gets us into trouble when we overlook things that we would have spotted had we applied deliberation to the problem.
Shaw and Nave consider AI as System 3
... continue reading