[flagged]
What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say "we" you're talking about Twitter, right?
I used that once, during a conference about 6 years ago and never again since. My use of "we" references humanity.
In that case, I feel that "we" needs some correction. Because these slopcannons get their ammunition from scraping the gargantuan septic tanks of the Internet, like Twitter and Facebook and whatever 600M Chinese people are using that I've never heard of.
Comparatively very little of that "humanity" corpus is coming from Shakespeare or Swift or Douglas Adams, much as we might prefer if it did.
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#133I think the antidote is ownership. Every part of a company or product needs some person or small group that owns it, understands it, and feels ownership over its long-term health. They review or decide what level of review changes to it can take. So much of what makes high-functioning teams work is a sense of ownership and stewardship, and what makes low-functioning teams break is a lack thereof. Someone with pride,…
Fortunately, the widespread use of LLMs results in companies reducing the number of things each team owns, and/or leaving lots of engineers on payroll who suddenly have abundant free time with which to start self-learning and developing a sense of ownership of parts of the product. Wait...
Nobody in this game of musical chairs wants the music to stop because there's poop on all of them.
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used that once, during a conference about 6 years ago and never again since. My use of "we" references humanity.
In that case, I feel that "we" needs some correction. Because these slopcannons get their ammunition from scraping the gargantuan septic tanks of the Internet, like Twitter and Facebook and whatever 600M Chinese people are using that I've never heard of. Comparatively very little of that "humanity" corpus is coming from Shakespeare or Swift or Douglas Adams, much as we might prefer if it did.
I never claimed it was trained on the notables of humanity. On the other hand, to your adjacent point (to twist it) that humanity needs some correction, I whole heartedly agree.
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#135Sometimes people make an assumption that every codebase has a team (or at least a single person) devoted to maintaining it. Companies with large codebases may not be able to afford that, or don't think it's worthwhile. You could have dozens or hundreds of libraries and only a few maintainers. The libraries are effectively "done" until something comes up. Work on them is interrupt-driven. In that situation, coming in…
In my opinion and experience that "normal" case is cognitive debt. Not having coding standards enforced: cognitive as well as technical debt. Missing / incorrect documentation. Uncertainty of provenance and what's actually running in production and how it gets there.
That's what you get in the "normal" case, and since the default attitude going into such situations should be Trust Nothing, if there was an LLM there I'd consult it. Magic 8-Ball, too. Rubber ducky? (Not that rubber ducky.) (I once wrote a dependency analyzer / oracle for PHP... in Perl.)
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#136fwiw, understanding was never really the goal. calling it "debt" assumes all of it needs to be repaid, but most of the time this just feels like brain OOM. imo the skill is knowing what actually needs to stay in your head.
It seems to me that assuming that debt needs to be repaid was moved to a footnote during the ZIRP years. I feel like there was a shift of the poles, the movement of a rift, you get the idea.
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#137> 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 That just sounds like everyone is going to be management. Blindly setting goals and demanding features of a black box, formerly the development team, soon to be 'AI' agents.
And most of these "managers" are barking orders, with no faith or expectation they will be followed; along with this, they find the soft cooing sounds of empty apologies comforting, rather than root cause and accepting some of the responsibility; they blame the workers when conflicting orders are not followed, and engage in language lawyering. They ask "workers" to check their own work; several times. They demand workers misrepresent their expertise; they demand the appearance of certification (but obviously don't want to pay or negotiate with someone with the actual credentials). They interpret silence as permission.
You wanna work for that person?
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#138Unfortunately I think Cognitive Debt is the cry of the software craftsperson who thought they were an Engineer. Upon working with the agent subcontractor, the agent factory, the agent part vendor, they approached it as a craft; they found themselves wanting to walk through the offices of the subcontractor reviewing screens, inspect pieces at the factory, and get the internal design for the parts they ordered. It's na…
So, the craftsperson looks at actual artifacts, but the engineer reads specs and drawings.
> but those are often just spells the software magician invokes after reading the ... documentation.
Oh, but the craftsperson does read shit after all.
Do you even read what you, yourself write?
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct, but it misses out an important dimension. You can inject philosophy into the agent and ensure that it sticks to it. The LLM will, with sufficient drilling, begrudgingly implement it, most important of which is SIMPLE>COMPLEX on all levels and you have to either manually or agentically continuously monitor this. Alternatively, LLM will use its tiny context window to build a true spaghetti that even it…
> Alternatively, LLM will use its tiny context window to build a true spaghetti that even itself cannot fix any more. And this is (probably) what is happening to the Claude Code product itself. The harness itself has regressed and is increasingly unstable. I get lots of weird glitches: - I scroll back in the conversation and keep seeing the the same sections repeated, I am not actually able to see the earlier parts o…
90-95% of all projects suffer this fate, and it didn't start with LLM. These projects include major commercial successes such as certain popular desktop Operating System and are essentially the standard state for many web services.
The projects that keep it simple and bare-necessity are either the ones that have scaled to enormous size (and complexity had to be removed for it to work), or ones that had strong philosophical and opinionated guardians, they are quite rare in practice.
Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct, but it misses out an important dimension. You can inject philosophy into the agent and ensure that it sticks to it. The LLM will, with sufficient drilling, begrudgingly implement it, most important of which is SIMPLE>COMPLEX on all levels and you have to either manually or agentically continuously monitor this. Alternatively, LLM will use its tiny context window to build a true spaghetti that even it…
I wonder if there is some easy way to have a "spaghetti index" of a codebase. One could then have different criteria for different projects / parts of projects. If it's a business critical thing that also expects to see a lot of future development, one could then communicate to management that the spaghetti index is too high and that must be first lowered before further development can happen. And on the other hand,…
It's not just codebase, it applies to product, design and even human interactions.
It's hard to describe how important I think this principle is for a project, company or even life.