It has a name now, and it's called Cognitive debt. And today I'm going to show you what it is, and why it's more dangerous than technical debt, and the tree practices that prevent it. A Margaret Ann's story, a computer science professor at the University of Victoria, introduced this concept in early 2026. She's me studying developer productivity for over two decades. When she named Cognitive debt, it spread through the engineering community in days.

One of the ways that, that chat G BT is very powerful is that uh if you're sufficiently educated about computers and you want to make a computer program and you can instruct uh chat G BT in what you want with enough specificity, it can write the code for you. It doesn't mean that every coder is going to be replaced by Chad GP T, but it means that a competent coder uh with an imagination can accomplish a lot more than she used to be able to, uh maybe she could do the work of five coders. Um So there's a dynamic where people who can master the technology can get a lot more done.