Cognitive Debt and Long Feedback Loops with Nathen Harvey

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]There's a term that I came across fairly recently by Margaret Ann Story talking about this term of cognitive debt. You were mentioning earlier that developers are maybe working more independently, but they're working with AI.

[00:00:12]But the concept of of cognitive debt is that we're losing the connectiveness with other people.

[00:00:19]We're going off in different directions.

[00:00:21]We lack that joined-up picture. I do wonder as the agentic workflows become more powerful, Mhm. we might see a a a speed-up of that cognitive debt, and some of the costs of that will take longer to materialize both in terms of how we feel as people, but also thinking about like when we make a bad architectural decision, you might not know about it for 6 to 12 months. Yeah. I wonder that if these things are going to come coming around again.

[00:00:52]Um Yeah, it's it's it's the thing that I'm very much worried about. We are hyper-focused on the can we build things faster today. And even can we get feedback and we evaluate the usefulness of this feature that we've just built.

[00:01:04]And I think getting fast feedback on small changes is relatively easy. But software is one of those things where to get real feedback and to really understand the ramifications of decisions we've made, it takes days, weeks, months, sometimes years of operations to really understand, oh boy, that was a real big architectural misstep that we made 6 months ago, 8 months ago, 16 months ago. I do think that while we are hyper-focused on build faster, this idea that it's the operations of software and the operations of software over time and the value that it provides to users over time, that's where all of the real value is.