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Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

simonwillison.netHow Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive DebtThis piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that …

Bryan Liles

@bryanl.dev

I’ve been experimenting with what I called CIRs to help with this. blog.bryanl.dev/posts/change...

blog.bryanl.devChange Intent Records: The Missing Artifact in AI-Assisted DevelopmentGit tells us what changed. ADRs tell us why we chose an architecture. But when AI writes the code, we need something new: a record of intent.

15/2/26, 12:38 pm0 reposts4 likes

Sean Horgan

@horgan.net

15 Feb

This looks super interesting, thanks for sharing. I've been writing up super short PRDs in a docs folder of the repo, loosely connected into the original PRD.md. I've found that useful for keeping track of the "why".