To me, the cognitive debt incurred by Agentic AI described here is not so different from the cognitive debt incurred by code written by someone else. Even when you are the reviewer of your colleague’s code, you can’t just grok everything as if the code were written by you. What more to say if you are not even the reviewer.
And that’s okay! Much like it’s okay to let other people write the code.
What is important is that the code written by Agentic AI is covered by automated tests adequately, and that you verify that the architectural plan is solid. But then this is also what you do with your colleagues’/juniors’ code.
yes, from the point of view of an individual programmer, there is no difference between code created by AI or by some other programmer.
but from the point of view of the company as a whole there is a difference: code created by some programmer is understood by that programmer, while code created by AI is understood by nobody
> code created by some programmer is understood by that programmer
was at some point understood by that programmer, at least for a few months, before they moved on to something else and forgot important context and detail, or left the company