Reminds me of Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building" which argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it. If you lose the people, you lose the program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct a program from its code. If you think of total software debt as technical debt + cognitive debt, then previously, we mostly had technical debt. Now with AI we have both. Previously, when you built something, you accumulated technical debt but relatively little cognitive debt because you had to understand what you were building in order to build it. In other words: the theory came for free as a byproduct of the work. AI breaks that coupling. Now you can produce code without building the theory. So you're now able to accumulate both kinds of debt simultaneously - technical debt in the code and cognitive debt in yourself. And cognitive debt is arguably worse because you can fool yourself into believing it doesn't exist. Technical debt tends to show up in semi-obvious ways that we understand well as an industry. Cognitive debt is more insidious - it means you're unable to even reason about the program (because you possess no theory of it) - which is what Naur describes as the "death" of a program.