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Public story · 2026-03-02 · source-backed
New chapter in the Agentic Engineering Patterns guide. "Cognitive debt" — when developers lose understanding of agent-generated code — mirrors technical debt at the comprehension level. Prescribes linear walkthroughs, animated explanations, and interactive interfaces. Coding agents can generate these tools on demand, transforming passive understanding into active comprehension. simonwillison.net
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Simon Willison launched a multi-chapter guide collecting practical patterns for working with coding agents. Chapters include "Writing code is cheap now," "First run the tests," "Red/green TDD," "Hoard things you know how to do," and the new "Interactive Explanations" chapter f...
The fourth chapter of Willison's Agentic Engineering Patterns guide addresses cognitive debt by having agents build interactive animated explanations of their own code. Martin Fowler endorsed the full guide. The methodology is now four chapters: (1) code is cheap, (2) red/gree...
Mario Zechner wrote an essay. Simon Willison amplified it. The core argument: agentic code generation creates "cognitive debt," where mistakes compound faster than humans can review them, and the speed that makes agents attractive is precisely what makes their failures catastr...
Willison's evolving "Agentic Engineering Patterns" series introduces two critical concepts. "Cognitive debt" — the danger of losing understanding of agent-generated code — is a distinct and more dangerous cousin of technical debt because you can't debug what you don't understa...
The crystallizing reference for agentic engineering. Four chapters: "Code is cheap now," "Red/Green TDD," "Hoard things you know how to do," and the new "Interactive Explanations" — having agents build animated visualizations to fight cognitive debt. Endorsed by Martin Fowler.
Third chapter of Willison's evolving Agentic Engineering Patterns guide (endorsed by Martin Fowler). Core technique: maintain a personal solutions library and feed proven examples to agents for recombination. This joins Red/Green TDD and "Writing code is cheap now" as the thre...
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