CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
not-new-but-faster · storey-2026-triple-debt
- Citation
- storey-2026-triple-debt
- Claim ID
- not-new-but-faster
- Assertion
- Storey argues that cognitive debt is not new, since developers have always worked with incomplete understanding, but that AI changes how fast it builds up and how hard it is to detect: writing code by hand forces a developer to build at least a partial mental model, while accepting AI-generated code may not.
- Quote
Cognitive debt is not new; developers have long worked with incomplete and distributed understanding of complex systems. What is new is the rate at which this gap can accumulate, and the difficulty of detecting it in AI-assisted development. [...] When a developer writes code from scratch, even messy code, the friction and effort mean they build at least a partial mental model along the way. [...] When an AI generates that same code, the developer may accept it without building the same level of understanding.
- Quote language
- en
- Locator
- section: Cognitive Debt: The Invisible Layer
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