Jared

Back in my contracting days, I tried to bill six hours each day, and I'd only bill when I was actively coding, and getting to a consistent six hours was rough.

The rest of Milan's article covers the cognitive ceiling, where developer time actually goes, the cost of interruptions, flow as a force multiplier, strategies for deep work, and why managers should care.

Comprehension debt, a hidden cost we don't track.

Here's Addy Osmani on managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code.

Quote, generation, or writing code, and discrimination, reading code, are different cognitive capabilities.

You can review code competently even after your ability to write it from scratch has atrophied.

But there's a threshold where review becomes rubber stamping.

End quote.

I feel seen in this one.

I've certainly looked at areas of a code base I oversaw the writing of and struggled to understand what is going on.

That being said, I've done that for code I wrote personally as well, sometimes as recently as yesterday.

Addy says, quote, the dangerous part, it's trivially easy to review code you can no longer write from scratch.

If your ability to read doesn't scale with the agent's ability to output, you're not engineering anymore.

You're hoping.

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Have yourself a great week.

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Welcome, friends.

I'm Jared, and you are listening to The Changelog, where each week we interview the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world.