Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
6 hours ago
- #Engineering metrics
- #Cognitive debt
- #AI-assisted development
- AI-assisted development accelerates code production but not comprehension, leading to cognitive debt.
- Cognitive debt is invisible in velocity metrics but surfaces later in reliability issues like increased Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
- Traditional engineering metrics (e.g., features shipped, commits merged) assume comprehension, which AI-assisted development decouples.
- Code review becomes a bottleneck as AI-generated code exceeds senior engineers' review bandwidth.
- Engineers experience burnout from high output but low confidence in their own AI-generated code.
- Organizational knowledge erodes as tacit understanding fails to form with AI-assisted development.
- Three failure modes of cognitive debt: opaque legacy code, prolonged incident resolution, and stunted growth of future senior engineers.
- Leadership sees AI-assisted development as a productivity gain but misses the hidden cognitive debt.
- The measurement system rewards velocity over comprehension, incentivizing debt accumulation.
- Tooling and documentation may mitigate, but the core issue remains: comprehension is not measured or incentivized.