Unfortunately I think Cognitive Debt is the cry of the software craftsperson who thought they were an Engineer. Upon working with the agent subcontractor, the agent factory, the agent part vendor, they approached it as a craft; they found themselves wanting to walk through the offices of the subcontractor reviewing screens, inspect pieces at the factory, and get the internal design for the parts they ordered. It's natural to get overwhelmed: this is why Engineers have contracts, specifications, design drawings, datasheets, and characterization data, handed over at clearly defined boundaries of abstraction, accepting the other side may be a black box.

Of course, we have had compilers and tooling, but those are the pencil and drafting board of the draftsperson. An ecosystem of packages, dependencies and APIs has evolved, but those are often just spells the software magician invokes after reading the spellbook^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H stackoverflow^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H API documentation.

We are going to need to build a new set of boundaries and abstractions with new handover protocols to manage this mess.

There is no party capable to take responsibility on the other side of the handover protocol.

Because waterfall software engineering has been so successful, right? ;-)