CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
Cognitive Debt — Simon Willison's Weblog
- Key
- willison-2026-cognitive-debt
- Authors
- Willison, Simon
- Issued
- 2026-2-15
- Type
- post-weblog
- Container
- Simon Willison's Weblog
Raw CSL JSON
{
"URL": "https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/",
"type": "post-weblog",
"title": "Cognitive Debt",
"author": [
{
"given": "Simon",
"family": "Willison"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
2026,
2,
15
]
]
},
"accessed": {
"date-parts": [
[
2026,
9,
26
]
]
},
"language": "en",
"container-title": "Simon Willison's Weblog"
}
Claims
-
Willison writes that after prompting whole features into existence without reviewing their implementations, he lost a firm mental model of his own projects, making each additional feature harder to reason about.
"I've found myself getting lost in my own projects. I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next."
Available in