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Cognitive load is what matters

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1455 points nromiun | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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xmprt ◴[30 Aug 25 17:46 UTC] No.45076575[source]▶
This is one of the reasons I fear AI will harm the software engineering industry. AI doesn't have any of these limitation so it can write extremely complex and unreadable code that works... until it doesn't. And then no one can fix it.

It's also why I urge junior engineers to not rely on AI so much because even though it makes writing code so much faster, it prevents them from learning the quirks of the codebase and eventually they'll lose the ability to write code on their own.

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fsckboy ◴[30 Aug 25 17:47 UTC] No.45076587[source]▶
>AI can write extremely complex and unreadable code that works... until it doesn't. And then

AI can fix it

I'm not defending or encouraging AI, just saying that argument doesn't work

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xmprt ◴[30 Aug 25 17:50 UTC] No.45076613[source]▶
I'm talking about cases where even AI can't fix it. I've heard of a lot of stories where people vibe code their applications to 80% and then get stuck in a loop where AI is unable to solve their problems.

It's been well documented that LLMs collapse after a certain complexity level.

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1. YetAnotherNick ◴[30 Aug 25 19:46 UTC] No.45077465[source]▶
> AI doesn't have any of these limitation

> AI is unable to solve their problems.

You are contradicting yourself. AI works worse than humans in places where cognitive load is required, and so it can't cross the boundary of cognitive load. If say it becomes better at managing cognitive load in the future, then in any case it doesn't matter as you can ask it to reduce the cognitive load in the code and it would.