Cognitive Debt
Cognitive debt (especially when coding with LLMs) is the gap between what your code does and what you/team actually understand about it.
Cognitive debt compounds:
- Today: faster feature delivery
- Later: slower debugging, fear of change, fragile systems, on-call pain
no shared theory of how it’s supposed to work
look also at 20251112113806⁝ Naur Theory (Programming as Theory Building)