Margaret Storey: How Will High-Performing Teams Adapt?
https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/18/cognitive-debt-revisited/:
High-performing teams have always managed technical debt intentionally. As AI is adopted by startups and large companies, the question becomes how teams will manage cognitive debt.
How will they shape socio-technical practices and tools to externalize intent and sustain shared understanding? How will they use Generative and Agentic AI not only to accelerate code production, but to maintain their collective theory?
These are great questions to help shape our processes. 1
Can't we just… use LLMs to keep the code clean? No, to maintain, change, and extend the code, teams need to understand what it does and why. Code is not enough (emphasis added):
[R]ebuilding lost knowledge requires restoring the distributed theory of the system. That includes capturing intent, the rationale behind decisions, key constraints, and how the architecture supports change. That theory is not stored in code alone. It is distributed across:
- People
- Documentation
- Tests
- Conversations
- Tooling
- And increasingly, AI agents
Repayment means maintaining all of these, not just refactoring code or updating architecture documents.
Read the whole post. I will be returning to it in my work.
Footnotes
This is our concern, dude.
RSS