Top 5 · 2026-02-16 · source-backed
"Deep Blue" / "AI Vampire" / "Cognitive Debt" — Three Concepts for the Human Cost of AI Coding
Story
A trilogy of frameworks emerged this week for understanding what AI coding is doing to developers. Simon Willison coined "Deep Blue" (the existential dread developers feel as AI agents improve — "What was I even for?"), Steve Yegge described the "AI Vampire" (the physical exhaustion of AI-assisted development, capping productive vibe coding at 3 hours/day), and software teams are naming "Cognitive Debt" (the erosion of shared codebase understanding when AI writes most of the code). These aren't Luddite complaints — they're experience reports from builders at the frontier, and they describe real failure modes that every team using AI tools needs to address. simonwillison.net · Steve Yegge / Medium
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