CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
- Key
- storey-2026-cognitive-debt-blog
- Authors
- Storey, Margaret-Anne
- Issued
- 2026-2-9
- Type
- post-weblog
Raw CSL JSON
{
"URL": "https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/",
"type": "post-weblog",
"title": "How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt",
"author": [
{
"given": "Margaret-Anne",
"family": "Storey"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
2026,
2,
9
]
]
},
"accessed": {
"date-parts": [
[
2026,
9,
26
]
]
},
"language": "en"
}
Claims
-
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.
"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"
Available in