
Cognitive debt: when your team no longer understands its AI-written code
Cognitive debt is the gap between how your system works and how well your team understands it. What research says about it, and how to prevent it without ditching AI.
What I test and learn about AI coding tools such as Claude Code, AI agents and MCP, and web development with PHP.

Cognitive debt is the gap between how your system works and how well your team understands it. What research says about it, and how to prevent it without ditching AI.

With programmatic tool calling, the model writes code that calls tools, and intermediate results stay out of the context. Sometimes 99% fewer tokens, sometimes more expensive.