There’s a concept doing the rounds at the moment called cognitive debt, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head for a few days now.

The idea is straightforward. Tech debt is what happens when you cut corners on code quality to ship faster, and then spend the next year paying for it in maintenance hell. Cognitive debt is what happens when you outsource the thinking itself. You ship the thing, it works, but you don’t actually understand why it works. The understanding got deferred along with the effort.