Commentators of agentic workflows seem to end up in one of two absolutes. Either: traditional coding is dead and AI agents are here to dominate, or, AI is too non-deterministic and it has no place in modern software development. But there may be a third way, one that recognizes the problems, and addresses the risk in a methodical way.
Enter "Cost of Cognitive Debt", or CCD. Given that we have a system with clear boundaries and clear separation of abstraction layers, we can begin to estimate what it would mean that no one understands that part of the system. Not understanding the inner workings of a system that a company strategy relies on has real world costs. You would, for instance, be unable to create a plan for overtaking your competitors without understanding your own technical limitations and advantages.
We can classify parts of systems that are not-humanly-understood as subject to Cognitive Debt, different from technical debt. Where technical debt describes understood technical problems within a system - Cognitive Debt describes the fact that you don't even understand if you have a problem, and consequently have no solution. It is reasonable to assume that Cognitive Debt eventually can end up in Cognitive Meltdown - a state where no human is able to build a mechanical intuition for how a system works given any reasonable amount of time, and hence would render the system useless from a business point of view. The cost of recovering insight outweighs any potential gains.
