From How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt (via Simon Willison):
Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from going fast lives in the brains of the developers and affects their lived experiences and abilities to "go fast" or to make changes. Even if AI agents produce code that could be easy to understand, the humans involved may have simply lost the plot and may not understand what the program is supposed to do, how their intentions were implemented, or how to possibly change it.
I hadn't come across this term before. It is a useful one to add to our collective vocabulary. I suppose that in just a couple of years we'll all be talking about this phenomenon like we talk about technical debt now.
I haven't personally felt this way yet, maybe that means I'm not fully embracing and giving in to the agents. But I can feel the urge to go there.
I bet that one of the best ways to avoid getting into cognitive debt is to continue to be the bottleneck.