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CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

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Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#71
post #37

There were some good insights in there. I like the idea of changing the hiring interview process to focus on testing code review ability. I feel like this would have been useful even before AI. A candidate who can identify tradeoffs present in some code and make insightful comments is likely good at systems thinking. It's a highly effective way to test someone's knowledge, intelligence and taste. It's actually brilli…

Yeah, that didn’t make any sense. If it’s functional, it impacts the system. 15k lines sure sounds like a lot of bloat.

I already feel like most established big company software projects are unmaintainable. With AI, it's going to be even more so.

Currently, even though a lot of software is unmaintainable in a general sense, there's usually some engineer somewhere you can go to who can fix any given part; there's somebody out there who understands what any given part does; or there's someone who could figure it out if given some time if a minor bug needs to be fixed. With AI, it's going to create a situation where there will be parts of the code which absolutely nobody in the world understands and AI agents won't know where to pull the context from to make sense of it either and there aren't enough attention heads to make sense of it. It won't be just unmaintainable, but absolutely unmaintainable; it will be physically impossible to fix a bug without introducing new ones.

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#72
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Time still flows linearly. It's just bad writing.

That's just being pedantic for the sake of pedantry. "Era" can refer to just about any period of time longer than a year or so. With fast-moving technology two years ago can feel like prehistory.

No it really doesn't though. Yes, it is pendantic on me but its still bad writing. 2 years is too little to be called an "era" no matter what the context is. If this is okay, lets start calling 1950s prehistoric then

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#73
> If your team can generate code faster than it can review it, you have a bottleneck. The constraint is human judgment, not output.

Given almost any group of coders, who are proficient in their technologies of choice, coding speed almost always exceeds reviewing speed. Same as it ever was.

Given any arbitrarily worthwhile problem to solve, the actual cost is in solving the problem or the cost to serve or both. Cost to serve if the solution is inefficient or the problem space barely tractable.

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#75
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CTOs were told that the companies shares will be sold off if they can't produce AI results, and that the CEO will be deposed for "not having an AI strategy", so they should kindly shut up and go along with the flow.

What’s the point of paying people a ton of money and giving them lots of power if they simply follow a script given to them by others?

Accountability sink.

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#76
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true before. Who wants to live on their saving for three years to build a product that might flop and do all the extra accounting and legal stuff. But now it takes 3 months with AI, making a business and charging money has never been easier. Legal is a problem, but AI is a big help there as well.

If you can build a product in three months that customers actually want, somebody else can copy it in two after they saw your version. Why should customers pay a lot of money for that?

I'm not convinced that me copying is making it easier for the next guy to copy it. But you are asking the right question. And if the AI hype is real then the customer won't pay the big company premium for software and even small one dev, no overhead companies will be competing with each other.
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