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Simon Willison: 'Cognitive Debt' — Florian Herrengt on How AI Layers Erode the Middle Tier of Engineering Comprehension
On August 12 Simon Willison quoted Florian Herrengt on the risk of teams accumulating so many AI-generated layers that nobody retains a working model of the system. The framing is cognitive debt rather than technical debt: the artifact still works, but the org loses the mid-level engineers who could reason about why. It is a counter-narrative worth holding against the same week's OpenAI enterprise data showing junior employees as the heaviest AI users.
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