> the question becomes how teams will manage cognitive debt

That’s the neat trick kiddo, they won’t. Across the industry, the messaging is clear: use AI and be more productive. Management is salivating at the idea of getting rid of people and keeping a higher share of profits for themselves. Most ICs I talk to are increasingly expressing the feeling of burnout, fear of losing jobs and resentment that AI is being pushed the way it is being pushed. I have more than a few conversations where people have clearly expressed that they are mostly focused on keeping their jobs. They don’t care about cognitive debt and some are looking forward to the time when the debt comes due.

It is depressing, but it is the reality.

You can use AI to manage cognitive debt, but it doesn't reflect on the sprint board.

Across the board, I still see people loving to over design things that can be much simpler. This isn't much changed because of LLM, LLM just allowed them to create the complicated implementations much faster.

Exactly what I’m hearing and feeling too. Devs I know are just going with it so they still have a job. No one cares about quality anymore it’s just a race to output as much code as possible. And when there’s docs, it’s just whatever slop they can have an llm output so it appears to their managers that won’t read it that they did work.

And we learned nothing of previous hype cycles.

Enshitification in this area will be shift. And there will be grand articles here on HN “nobody could possibly have seen this coming.” Yes we did.