Flutterby™! : Cognitive Debt

A programmer's loss of identity. I guess I'm lucky in that my association between mean and the Internet's notion of "programmer" kinda diverged when /. got funding, but this is an interesting meditation on how the general adoption of slop prompting as "programming" is changing the identity of those of us who think that reasoning about systems is important.

Via Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe

Meanwhile, Chris Dickinson @isntitvacant@hachyderm.io linked to Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building (PDF) (You may remember Naur as the "N" in BNF notation) in response to Simon Willison's acknowledgement that LLMs separate him from the model building:

I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next.

In linking to Margaret Storey's How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt (which also links to the Naur piece).

In response to Simon's note, Jed Brown @jedbrown@hachyderm.io wrote:

I believe the effect you describe becomes more insidious in larger projects, with distributed developer communities and bespoke domain knowledge. Such conditions are typical in research software/infrastructure (my domain), and the cost of recovering from such debt will often be intractable under public funding models (very lean; deliverables only for basic research, not maintenance and onboarding). Offloading to LLMs interferes not just with the cognitive processes of the "author", but also that of maintainers and other community members.