The article very much resonates with my experience past several months.

The project I work on has been steadily growing for years, but the amount of engineers taking care of it stayed same or even declined a bit. Most of features are isolated and left untouched for months unless something comes up.

So far, I managed growing scope by relying on tests more and more. Then I switched to exclusively developing against a simulator. Checking changes with real system become rare and more involved - when you have to check, it's usually the gnarliest parts.

Last year's, I noticed I can no longer answer questions about several features because despite working on those for a couple of months and reviewing PRs, I barely hold the details in my head soon afterwards. And this all even before coding agents penetrated deep into our process.

With agents, I noticed exactly what article talks about. Reviewing PR feels even more implicit, I have to exert deliberate effort because tacit knowledge of context didn't form yet and you have to review more than before - the stuff goes into one ear and out of another. My team mates report similar experience.

Currently, we are trying various approaches to deal with that, it it's still too early to tell. We now commit agent plans alongside code to maybe not lose insights gained during development. Tasks with vague requirements we'd implicitly understand most of previously are now a bottleneck because when you type requirements to an agent for planning immediately surface various issues you'd think of during backlog grooming. Skill MDs are often tacit knowledge dumps we previously kept distributed in less formal ways. Agents are forcing us to up our process game and discipline, real people benefit from that too. As article mentioned, I am looking forward to tools picking some of that slack.

One other thing that surprised me was that my eng manager was seemingly oblivious to my ongoing complains about growing cognitive load and confusion rate. It's as if the concept was alien to them or they could comprehend that other people handle that at different capacity than them.

> One other thing that surprised me was that my eng manager was seemingly oblivious to my ongoing complains about growing cognitive load and confusion rate.

Engineering managers in my experience (even in ones with deep technical backgrounds) often miss the trees for the forest. The best ones go to bat for you, especially once verifying that they can do something to unblock or support you. But that’s still different than being in the terminal or IDE all day.

Offloading cognitive load is pretty much their entire role.

Learning has always been to write things down. Just reading it seldom sticks.

I think that recording dialog with the agent (prompt, the agent's plan, and agent's report after implementation) will become increasingly important in the future.

We don't have the right abstractions in place to support true AI driven work. We replaced ourselves but we don't have the tools to do '1 layer up'.