Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building 1985 https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-6074(85)90032-8

Programming as theory building 1985 in Zotero

hypothesis: in AI and agentic AI use cog debt likely bigger issue than techdebt.

Image putting techdebt and cognitive debt next to each other. Looks very generated btw. Techdebt described as legacy code, quick fixes, buggy logic: messy code & complexity. Cognitive debt as: lost understanding, knowledge gaps, team confusion: overhelmed developers.

If we treat [[Corporations as Slow AI 20180201210258]], how does this play out in organisations, what have we developed in response to it? Do corporate boards have an overview of what is really happening? Do I in my team? #openvraag

key imo. generating code / material, can quickly mean loss of overview (I see how that happens in my use of #algogens if I don't explicitly counteract it), uncertainty about how demands were implemented, and thus what entry points for change there are.

Cognitive debt here described that it comes from going fast during dev, resulting in reduced ability to make changes / go fast in the future, bc of affected experiences and abilities of the people involved.

Ref's Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task in Zotero

https://web.archive.org/web/20260215110316/https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/

By Margaret-Anne Storey, Professor of Computer Science, University of Victoria and Canada Research Chair in Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret-Anne_Storey

added to feedreader

Vibecoding and adjacent projects lead to loosing overview of your own work, no mental model of what you made as you would have otherwise. Extending something becomes harder over time, bc you don't know what you're actually extending from. This is a counter force (not counter argument I think) to the notion of genAI having deterministic automation as endpoint.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260215105347/https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/

Simon Willison on cognitive debt (the consequences of vibecoding more or less).

Study on Cognitive Debt, via [[Peter Rukavina p]]

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task in Zotero

This piece does not look at cognitivedebt where I saw it mentioned most (i.e. around the effect of vibecoding), it looks at using LLMs in writing (essays)

[[Peter Rukavina p]] on cognitive debt, vs cognitive investment aka learning wrt mundane infrequent multistep tasks. Good nudge to maintain little checklists for infrequent things better.

"I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers”. It is a phenomenal largely (but not exclusively) fuelled by the deployment of LLMs at scale. Answers are now much, much cheaper to come by.

Additionally, I am most interested in exploring Cognitive Debt not from an individual perspective, but from a group one. It is critical to thinking through the implications of using these technologies inside an organisation, or between an organisation and its employees, a government and its citizens, and so on and so forth."

n:: cognitive debt - [ ] return