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What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

margaretstorey.com

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Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#141

Post by sfink »

belZaah wrote: post #53

It’s a general principle. Complexity breeds complexity via a multitude of mechanisms thus growing exponentially. As complexity is also related to cost, this means, that there are two limits approached exponentially: financial (we can no longer afford complexity) and cognitive (ee can no longer understand). In an ideal world, financial barrier arrives first, as it is necessary to understand something to make it constr…

I understand pretty well why this didn't work with the government. I'm curious how this worked out at X. I have the impression that not only did he break the system into pieces, he also just threw out many of the pieces. That's a pretty effective form of simplification, but it runs the risk of being too simple in that the system loses some critical functions.

"Simplify my code."

"Ok, all code deleted, what next?"

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#142

Post by sfink »

melvinroest wrote: post #6

Edit: yep, I really do type this much. I'm a bit of a "thinking out loud" person. > Cognitive Debt, Like Technical Debt, Must Be Repaid In quite a few circumstances, cognitive debt doesn't entirely need to be repaid. I personally found with multiple projects that certain directions aren't the one I want to go in. But I only found it out after fully fleshing it out with Claude Code and then by using my own app realizi…

I would phrase what you're saying differently. You can pay down cognitive debt by incrementally simplifying a system, or by throwing it out and rewriting. You're just describing the standard decision between rewriting or fixing in place. Joel Spolsky famously argued against rewriting in nearly any situation, but AI changes the argument. (As does the much higher starting point of open source libraries and systems and frameworks usable for many things; it's been awhile since he made the argument.)

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#143

Post by casualscience »

JambalayaJimbo wrote: post #98
casualscience wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this isn't a unique perspective, I think it's wild more people don't understand this. What happened is everyone is being "promoted" to staff+ level engineer and they're realizing the realities of that situation. The funny part is that these are the same people who are upset that these folks up the food chain "do nothing".

If you’re a manager you have people under you that care about the code they write and the direction of the company, not typewriter monkeys.

Not my experience, most people are mercenaries, most people make mistakes, most people need their code and architecture reviewed. Obviously working with a person and working with an AI are not identical, but most of the broad responsibilities are the same.

And it's much more like senior IC than it is manager.

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#144

Post by hogehoge51 »

scorpioxy wrote: post #113
bonesss wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the widespread existence of business programs, certification and training heavy, obviously proves every project and business methodology is “bad” and the problem is the tool of “business methodologies”? PRINCE2, for example, is constantly fumbled and misunderstood by immature juniors. They don’t get it, and screw it up. So… what? Haphazard planning and last minute project detonations must replace any effort to avo…

I am not sure how you jumped from what I said to this. I don't believe I claimed that every project and business methodology is bad. I can only speak from my experience and am not confident enough to say how every project and business methodology should or shouldn't work. I do believe you are helping to make my point though. I am saying that the process may very well be perfection but if entities within "meatspace" c…

That the methodology is established and is correct for the project and business is what a manager should be doing - at best an industry established process should make that easier, but it can't remove all the work.

Ensuring the methodology survives contact with the "meatspace" is what a leader should be doing - and even if the process is perfect for the project and business this can still be a lot of work.

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#145

Post by thin_carapace »

nottorp wrote: post #104
thin_carapace wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bidirectional inverted commas, negative parallelism, short punchy prose, dot point listing ... these language techniques are consistently present throughout. whether this article was written by AI or not, its structure and style utterly screams of AI.

But which was the first, the chicken or the egg? The LLMs have been trained on soulless corporate speak.

it is understood that LLM style is derived from human style, and that LLM style is now influencing human style. this doesnt make it any more obvious how to type an em dash or bidirectional inverted comma. nobody outside of academia or publishing uses these techniques of their own accord, only LLMs do. thusly i optimize out your chicken/egg conditional as it seems like a redundant branch - if something looks like AI, it's probably AI, so why does it matter what the AI was trained on?

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#146

Post by Gravityloss »

Aperocky wrote: post #140
Gravityloss wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, sure, it won't solve everything and wouldn't be perfect.

In a corporate environment, if you can measure something with a number, then you can set a target and pass/fail criteria and so on. Developers' personal opinions of some code base's quality are harder to build corporate processes around.

There's things like integration tests and static analysis. Of course again, not foolproof and don't solve all problems. But they help. Especially in a corporate environment where you need all the mechanisms you can get to prevent skimping on quality.

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#147

Post by yuye »

srdjanr wrote: post #120
yuye wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the antidote is ownership. I've said this before, but people gloss over this fact. >Someone with pride, drive, and a high standard feeling responsible for a particular area or thing. I've also said this before, but AI-glazers just respond with "I think we may just have to let go of pride & kudos and their connection to our identity." Most people who vibecode don't give a shit about their work. Any solution i…

Of course there are examples of software killing or being capable of killing (operating machinery or medical devices), but that doesn't apply to probably 90+% of software

Should've made my example a bit less extreme, but other forms of harm exist:

Downtime causing monetary damage (This one is obvious...)

Improper security measures causing leaks of customer data, making the victims a target for spam, or in extreme cases, identity theft, scams and (spear)phishing. One of the reasons why I am strongly opposed to having every random calorie counter app requiring you to sign up for an account asking you for your email and/or phone number.

I also recently saw a post here on HN about how VSCode had a bug that caused all commits to have a "Co-authored bv Copilot" line in the commit message, even if Copilot was disabled. One of the top replies mentioned how this could cause issues with employees working for companies that disallow the use of Copilot.

When you take these risks into account, I'm pretty sure you cover the vast majority of software.

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#148

Post by alexmuresan »

ido wrote: post #97
alexmuresan wrote: post #79

The post makes some good points. As a programmer I love writing code. I know coding is just a tool but I enjoy the act of thinking about a problem, finding a solution and implementing it. It gives me a little dopamine boost. Ever since LLMs started writing decent code, I started feeling like a part of that joy of code-writing has been taken away. Using LLMs literally leaves a developer to do (what I find is) the wors…

I empathize with all of the above, but ive honestly felt that way more or less the moment I went from “programmer” to “founder” (I run a small startup since 2021, so a couple years before “agentic programming”). At some point I accepted this as the cost of working at a higher level of abstraction (and getting more done as a result, whether via a human employee or an LLM doing the work I used to do). I know older devs…

While I agree with this, I think these are two different stances: the one you mention is a natural progression of moving, the way you put it, from programmer to founder. It’s something you want to do. An intentional move. While my stance is more similar to saying: “I want to be a programmer but I am forced to be a PM”. I’m forced by corporate culture (so to speak) to coordinate AI agents.

I don’t mind adapting. And you are right. I just loved writing code too.

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#149

Post by nottorp »

thin_carapace wrote: post #145
nottorp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But which was the first, the chicken or the egg? The LLMs have been trained on soulless corporate speak.

it is understood that LLM style is derived from human style, and that LLM style is now influencing human style. this doesnt make it any more obvious how to type an em dash or bidirectional inverted comma. nobody outside of academia or publishing uses these techniques of their own accord, only LLMs do. thusly i optimize out your chicken/egg conditional as it seems like a redundant branch - if something looks like AI,…

Because it means there are people who write like that of their own accord. Somewhere, out there...

Re: What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

#150

Post by gavinh »

I'm working on a tool for mitigating the cognitive debt from AI-assisted development. Pedagogical research provides some techniques we can use in code review to improve comprehension and recall. If this resonates with you, I'd appreciate hearing more about your experience with cognitive debt.
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