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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.

Andrej Karpathy, on the one-year anniversary of coining "vibe coding" (emphasis mine):

The one thing I'd add is that at the time, LLM capability was low enough that you'd mostly use vibe coding for fun throwaway projects, demos and explorations. It was good fun and it almost worked. Today (1 year later), programming via LLM agents is increasingly becoming a default workflow for professionals, except with more oversight and scrutiny. The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software.

Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally my current favorite "agentic engineering":

• "agentic" because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time, you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight.
• "engineering" to emphasize that there is an art & science and expertise to it. It's something you can learn and become better at, with its own depth of a different kind.

I like "agentic engineering" and I'm seeing more people use this term. I'm going to adopt this going forward. Changing the tag on my blog from "AI Coding" to "Agentic Engineering".