Edit: yep, I really do type this much. I'm a bit of a "thinking out loud" person.

> Cognitive Debt, Like Technical Debt, Must Be Repaid

In quite a few circumstances, cognitive debt doesn't entirely need to be repaid. I personally found with multiple projects that certain directions aren't the one I want to go in. But I only found it out after fully fleshing it out with Claude Code and then by using my own app realizing that certain things that I thought would work, they don't.

For example, I created library.aliceindataland.com (a narrative driven SQL course). After a while, I noticed that the grading scheme was off and it needed to be rewritten. The same goes for how I wanted to implement the cheatsheet, or lessons not following the standard format. Of course, I need to understand the new code but I don't need to understand the old code.

With other small forms of code, I just don't really need to know how things work because it's that simple. For example, every 5 minutes I track to which wifi network I'm connected with. It's mostly useful to simply know whether I went to the office that day or not. A python script retrieves the data and when I look at it, I can recognize that it's correct. But doing it this way is sure a lot faster than active recall.

At work, I've had similar things. At my previous job I created SEO and SEA tools for marketing experts. So I remember creating this whole app that gave experts insights into SEO things that Ahrefs and similar sites don't, as it was tailored to the data of the company I worked at. The feedback I basically got was: the data is great, the insights are necessary, but the way the app works is unusuable for us. I was a bit perplexed as I personally didn't find it that complicated. But I also know that I'm not the one using it. Then I created a second version and that was way more usable. The second version assumed a completely different front-end app and front-end app architecture though. All the cognitive debt of V1? No payback needed.

The reason that this is the case, as it seems to me, fall under a few categories:

1. Experimenting with technologies. If you have certain assumptions about how a technology works but it turns out you're wrong, or you learn through the process that an adjacent technology works way better, then you need to redo it. Back when coding by hand was such a thing, I had this with a collaborative drawing project called Doodledocs (2019). I didn't know if browsers supported pressure sensitivity and to what extent it was easy to implement. It required a few programming experiments.

2. It's a small and simple script, not much more to it.

3. Experimenting with usability. A lot of the time, we don't know how usable our app is. In my experience, this seems to be either because (1) it's a hobby project or (2) the UX people have been fired years ago. In these cases, more often than not, UX becomes an afterthought. But with LLMs, delivering a 95% fully working version is usually done within a week for a greenfield project. This 95% fully working version is an amazing high fidelity interaction prototype (95% no less). Once you do that for a few iterations, you then understand what you really need. Once you understand what you really need, then you can start repaying the cognitive debt.

I've found it's usually category 3, sometimes 2 and rarely 1.