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Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

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Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#11

Post by soared »

lolive wrote: post #6

I have been in a big company for 4 years, and following the zillions of projets going on here and there, how they interact [nicely or not] has become a job in itself. Very disturbing as I thought my technical skills would help me clarify the global picture. And that is exactly the contrary that is happening.

I was at a company with one (complex) product and joined a company 10x large with 50x as many products - there is zero chance anyone could understand the global picture, though some of us are expected to somewhat grasp it. Quite the challenge, would be truly impossible with llms

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#12

Post by sghiassy »

Very much feel this.

I wrote a SaaS project over the weekend. I was amazed at how fast Claude implemented features. 1 sentence turned into a TDD that looked right to me and features worked

but now 3 weeks later I only have the outlines of how it works and regaining the context on the system sounds painful

In projects I hand wrote I could probably still locate major files and recall system architectures after years being away

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#14

Post by Retric »

pajtai wrote: post #9

The whole premise of the post, that coders remember what and why they wrote things from 6 months ago, is flawed. We've always had the problem that understanding while writing code is easier than understanding code you've written. This is why, in the pre-AI era, Joel Spolsky wrote: "It's harder to read code than to write it."

Harder here doesn’t mean slower. Reading and understanding your own code is way faster than writing and testing it, but it’s not easy.

AI tools don’t prevent people from understanding the code they are producing as it wouldn’t actually take that much time, but there’s a natural tendency to avoid hard work. Of course AI code is generally terrible making the process even more painful, but you where just looking at the context that created it so you have a leg up.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#15

Post by gusmally »

soared wrote: post #4

The organizational memory and on-call debugging sections allude to this, but there are significant effects on other parts of the organization. For example, if I work in product support and a customers asks about a products behavior - it becomes much more challenging to find answers if documentation is sparse (or ai written), engineers don’t immediately know the basics of the code they wrote, etc. Even if documentatio…

With the free time gained from not manually writing code, documentation should be part of the workflow. I should start doing this.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#16

Post by baumy »

Management where I work is currently touting a youtube video from some influencer about the levels of AI development, one of the later ones being "you'll care that it works, not how".

We are all supposed to be advancing through these levels. Moving at a pace where you actually understand the system you're responsible for is now considered a performance issue. But also, we're "still held responsible for quality".

Needless to say I'm dusting off my resume, but I'm sure plenty of other companies are following the same playbook.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#17

Post by gusmally »

> When circumstances eventually require that understanding, when something breaks in an unexpected way or requirements change in a way that demands architectural reasoning, the organization discovers the deficit.

Maybe it's because I work in such a small team on a still-starting project, but even with the chaos of LLM-generated code, I can't imagine such a case as above that the LLMs couldn't also address.

Great read though and I appreciated the article.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#19

Post by esafak »

Just read every line of the generated code and make sure it is as clear and good as possible. If you can't understand it when it's new you won't tomorrow, either. This verification process places a natural limit on the rate at which you can safely generate code. I suppose you could reduce that to spot checks and achieve probabilistic correctness but I would not venture there for things that matter.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#20

Post by empath75 »

pajtai wrote: post #9

The whole premise of the post, that coders remember what and why they wrote things from 6 months ago, is flawed. We've always had the problem that understanding while writing code is easier than understanding code you've written. This is why, in the pre-AI era, Joel Spolsky wrote: "It's harder to read code than to write it."

I have been laboriously going through the process of adding documentation and comments in code explaining the purpose and all the interfaces we expect and adding tests for the purpose of making it easier for claude to work with it but it also makes it easier for me to work with it.

Claude often makes a hash of our legacy code and then i go look at what we had there before it started and think “i don’t even know what i was thinking, why is this even here?”

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