Simon Willison: 'Cognitive Debt' — Florian Herrengt on How AI Layers Erode the Middle Tier of Engineering Comprehension
Simon Willison·medium signal
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.