John V. Willshire wrote a blog post titled Cognitive Debt (5 May 2025).
« Where technical debt for an organisation is “the implied cost of additional work in the future resulting from choosing an expedient solution over a more robust one”, cognitive debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are. »
« “With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money you’ll be paying interest… I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.” — Ward Cunningham »
« Notice that, in the original idea and metaphor, you are always meant to repay the debt. Everyone knows it is a shortcut, and you must revisit the thing you didn’t do before in order to clear your slate. Perhaps this is a useful measure for Cognitive Debt; are we incurring a debt by not doing the thinking in the present that we will need to demonstrate in the future? »
« “People have a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia towards LLMs. They can think ‘AI is bad at things I am good at and know about, but good at things I can’t judge because I’m bad at them’” — Andrew Taylor »
Articles of Interest 