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'Cognitive Debt': the Department's Designated AI Guy Says He Can No Longer Explain the System He Shipped
A developer who became his department's early LLM adopter and 'AI guy' posted to r/artificial that leading a complex system built heavily with LLM assistance has left him anxious about how much of the architecture he actually holds in his own head. The thread drew 58 upvotes and 53 comments — a 0.91 comment-to-score ratio, the highest engagement density in the day's sample — with other practitioners describing the same pattern. It's an anecdote, not data, but it names a specific failure mode of high-leverage agentic coding that benchmark-driven coverage systematically misses: velocity gains that quietly transfer system understanding out of the team.
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