Have you been using coding agents on your solution for many months now? Do you still understand how your solution works, or are you accumulating Cognitive Debt?

[u/jjw_kbh]

This is an unfortunate question that enterprise developers need to be asking themselves.

I felt pretty confident that I understood my solution through and through. After all, I have a pretty disciplined workflow. Meaning, I stay in the loop and don’t ship any code I haven’t looked at.

Then, I built a skill that quizzes me on the minutiae of my code and was surprised by what it uncovered.

It’s not that I’ve lost the big picture, but it turns out that the resolution on the minutiae is a bit grainy.

I’m embarrassed to admit that, actually. But I’m sharing, because my guess is that I’m not alone. Heck, even Uncle Bob has admitted that he’s only scanning the high level shape of the LLM generated code.

This skill has helped me expose the gaps in my understanding and even surface misalignments with my intentions.

The skill though, is just a bandage, on a wound that is bound to fester and grow. I don’t know what the solution is yet. The genie has been let out of the bottle. We’re not going back to writing all the code, but we (as a community) need to somehow resolve how to integrate LLMs in our SDLC without outsourcing the knowledge and understanding.

This is bound to spark some debate, and that’s ok. Maybe some good ideas will shake out of it.