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lives-in-developers · storey-2026-cognitive-debt-blog

Revision eb166905-cb94-43bf-bc73-3fa4d9298cd1 · 9/26/2026, 3:22:16 PM UTC
Claim ID
lives-in-developers
Assertion
Storey describes cognitive debt, a term she says was gaining traction and links to the MIT study, as debt from going fast that lives in developers' brains rather than in the code, so that even readable AI-generated code may leave the humans involved without an understanding of what it does.
Quote
Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from going fast lives in the brains of the developers and affects their lived experiences and abilities to “go fast” or to make changes. Even if AI agents produce code that could be easy to understand, the humans involved may have simply lost the plot
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