The Cost of Cognitive Debt
ljtn.github.io
2 threads
What agentic workflows change is that we can now produce code that never had a theory behind it to begin with.
That's exactly right: there's no because there.
I think with more agentic code comes the responsibility of more documentation, more architectural understanding.
Perhaps agentic code is the equivalent to a C compiler outputting what previously was the domain of assembly engineers.
I think what is different from the assembly -> C analogy is that we are now non-deterministic. You could almost argue that going to C increased human understanding, as we could express problems in a more human way. And while agents enable us to express ourselves in natural language, we lost the determinism along the way.