Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop
Public

AI made writing code easier. It also made being an engineer harder. ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai

Early CodeGen enthusiasts talked about "I can accomplish code while walking my dog / taking my kid to the park". Shock and surprise, capitalism doesn't work that way.

Engineers are working longer hours, doing less fulfilling work, are expected to ship faster, often after their org experiences major layoffs, and the quality of output is lower.

AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Engineering Harder.

Writing code is easier than ever. Being a software engineer is harder than ever. The paradox nobody talks about, and what engineers and leaders should do.

www.ivanturkovic.com · Signal Through the Noise

Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop
Public

Engineers are also understanding the contents of their codebases less, leading to "cognitive debt".

margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/0
simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/

"Technical debt" is where technical issues and mistakes pile up without being fixed. This is happening too, but "cognitive debt" is where more of your codebase has been produced without you knowing or understanding how it works, leading engineers often to become helpless in terms of being stewards of their own codebases.

And it's not just happening to software engineering. Workers everywhere are suffering from cognitive debt as AI rolls out across their workforces.

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt

The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...

margaretstorey.com · Margaret-Anne Storey

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