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It is a bit surprising sometimes when you vibe code an AI tool and it ends up doing a bunch of regular expressions to "detect the user's intention". Instead of the code using an LLM to see which tool to run, or if they want to see the SQL or the code you end up seeing .*SQL or \i^build (or some crazy regex). It really likes to use a lot of regex when it's building AI tools.
For things that are appropriate to build with agents, I have come to hold the strong opinion that you need to go all-in. If you built it with an agent, then you fix it with an agent, you debug it with an agent, and you change it with an agent.
In that case you should not consider yourself the steward of the source code and worry about “cognitive debt”- it’s literally not your job anymore. Your job is the keeper of the specification and care and feeding of the agents.
If you adopt the mindset that “I’m not going to build the documentation for me, I’m going to build it for the agent”, and “I’m not going to try to use my development skills to debug something I didn’t write, I’m going to make specific interfaces for the agent to understand the state and activity of the running code”, etc.- you’ll be a lot happier and more successful.
If you are using agents for autocomplete in your editor, or you open a separate chat window to ask a question about your code- that’s a very low level of agent usage and all your existing dev skills and responsibilities still apply.
If you’re using a planning framework like superpowers (the skill) and just laying out the spec for the program, then keep your fingers out of the source code, and don’t waste your time reading it. Have the agent explain it, showing you in the IDE, and make the agent make any changes you want.
> the question becomes how teams will manage cognitive debt That’s the neat trick kiddo, they won’t. Across the industry, the messaging is clear: use AI and be more productive. Management is salivating at the idea of getting rid of people and keeping a higher share of profits for themselves. Most ICs I talk to are increasingly expressing the feeling of burnout, fear of losing jobs and resentment that AI is being push…
Enshitification in this area will be shift. And there will be grand articles here on HN “nobody could possibly have seen this coming.” Yes we did.
Was this article written by AI?
I 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,…
At one business I was a part of where that experiment was tried, it failed badly. In reality, people were being switched around on projects and the "owner" was changing every few months. The end result was quite messy, both in terms of technical debt and politics(about who's the final decision maker).
> the question becomes how teams will manage cognitive debt That’s the neat trick kiddo, they won’t. Across the industry, the messaging is clear: use AI and be more productive. Management is salivating at the idea of getting rid of people and keeping a higher share of profits for themselves. Most ICs I talk to are increasingly expressing the feeling of burnout, fear of losing jobs and resentment that AI is being push…
Across the board, I still see people loving to over design things that can be much simpler. This isn't much changed because of LLM, LLM just allowed them to create the complicated implementations much faster.
> the question becomes how teams will manage cognitive debt That’s the neat trick kiddo, they won’t. Across the industry, the messaging is clear: use AI and be more productive. Management is salivating at the idea of getting rid of people and keeping a higher share of profits for themselves. Most ICs I talk to are increasingly expressing the feeling of burnout, fear of losing jobs and resentment that AI is being push…
And we learned nothing of previous hype cycles. Enshitification in this area will be shift. And there will be grand articles here on HN “nobody could possibly have seen this coming.” Yes we did.
Which means the stuff that replace it will also happen faster.
Overall, the quality of the software is likely similar, since AI do not have purpose, and software still largely reflect human will and thinking.