The "cognitive debt" framing resonates, but from an unexpected direction. I'm not a developer. I've never written a line of code. I built enterprise software, a live computer vision system monitoring industrial cranes, deployed on Google Cloud Run, generating six figures in contracts, entirely by chatting with Claude. No IDE, no terminal muscle memory to lose.

For me, there is no cognitive debt in the code. There's no ground truth I'm losing touch with, because I never had it. The ground truth I bring is domain knowledge: fifteen years of understanding what an industrial operator actually needs to see on a screen at 3am. What Breen describes as "junk food", the dopamine hit of watching Claude build a new feature is, for domain experts like me, the first time in history we could participate in building at all. The gap that existed wasn't "developer loses touch with code." It was "person closest to the problem could never build the solution." But his core point about writing holds, even here. The thinking that produces good software requirements, the careful articulation of what needs to be built and why, that remains irreducibly human. My most important contributions to my own codebase aren't commits. They're the precise questions I ask. Maybe cognitive debt is domain-specific. Developers accumulate it. Domain experts spend it.