The Invisible Cost: From Creator to Consumer
8 days ago
- #AI Impact
- #Software Engineering
- #Cognitive Leakage
- The author reflects on 'Cognitive Leakage' and the Law of Conservation of Cost in software engineering, emphasizing the hidden costs of high-level abstractions like Low-Code platforms and AI coding assistants.
- Cognitive Leakage is defined as the atrophy of mental models due to over-reliance on tools, leading to a degradation from 'Creators' to 'Consumers' of systems.
- The Law of Conservation of Cost posits that shortcuts taken today will require future refactoring with compound interest, highlighting the inevitable repayment of cognitive costs.
- The article discusses the 'Creator-Consumer Singularity,' where engineers lose problem-solving abilities by depending too much on black-box tools.
- Neuroscientific evidence supports that outsourcing cognition leads to the atrophy of mental models, reinforcing the concept of Cognitive Leakage.
- The author advocates for maintaining 'Cognitive Sovereignty'—deliberate practice and understanding to avoid becoming slaves to tools.
- Refactoring is framed as 'Cognitive Repurchase,' where teams must recover lost knowledge and context, often at a high cost.
- The article concludes with a call to balance abstraction and control, emphasizing the need for governance in using tools within complex, long-lifecycle systems.