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A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared understanding of how and why that system works and can be changed over time.
The post sparked thoughtful discussion across different communities. Rather than respond thread by thread, I want to synthesize what I’m hearing and connect it to other reflections I’ve been reading. I will likely update this as the conversation evolves.
A Growing Concern About Shared Understanding
Several practitioners, including Simon Willison and others on a Hacker News discussion of a Martin Fowler article, describe experiencing cognitive debt directly. They talk about getting lost in their own projects and finding it harder to confidently add new features. They can move faster, but they lose the deeper sensemaking that connects decisions to intent, and intent to code.
This is not just about code quality. It is about whether individual developers and product teams can maintain a coherent mental model of what the system is doing and why.
Across these discussions, one theme is consistent: velocity can outpace understanding.
Cognitive Debt Hurts Developers, Not Just the Software
Technical debt lives in the code.
Cognitive debt lives in people.
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