Dragan Stepanović

The message about comprehension debt is spreading far

When code's being created at "LGTM-speed", there's trouble ahead.

codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/c...

"But we can add the guardrails for the code! Otherwise, how are we going to deal with the shitload of inventory of unreviewed code?!"

You took the wrong turn 3 crossroads before, mate, when you first implied that the coding is a bottleneck.

And lately I've been going back to Ward's definition of technical debt, and seems there's an overlap between what's called cognitive debt nowadays and that definition of his of technical debt, if it's not the same.

End of rant :)

Vibe coding is leading to deeply fragmented mental model of the system even within individuals.
Like trading with multiples leverage, leading to elevated downside risk and volatility.

In between ensemble and vibe is pair programming and working in isolation (individually).

I see it as: at one end of the spectrum is ensemble/mob programming (strong consistency of the mental model of the system's inner workings shared across the team) and at the other side are all the versions of vibe coding (not understanding how the system works).

Love it. The fragmentation of the shared mental model of a team is something that is definitely taking place from my experience.

It's hard to get anything else than that

I can guarantee you that addressing an actual bottleneck in the system definitely shouldn't look like pushing elephant-sized inventory through the boa constrictor (coding → review → integration → deployment → etc.).

And you can tell by the elephant rolling its eyes.

The Bottleneck That Wasn't Here's the punchline already at the start: If you say you addressed a bottleneck in the system (coding), and then you claim it moved to some other place (e.g.

More on this here:
draganstepanovic.substack.com/p/the-bottle...

So, you really need to be sure you know what you're doing.

Takeaway: Systems often deteriorate not _in spite_, but _because_ of our efforts to improve them.

If you address a bottleneck - by Theory of Constraints, it's the most constrained part of the system - by definition you must observe huge increase in throughput of the system, i.e. productivity.

And you're most likely making things even worse without knowing, by piling up even more inventory in the system and choking its throughput.

If you say you addressed a bottleneck in the system, and then you claim it moved to some other place without having observed a huge productivity increase of the whole system in between, it wasn't where you initially thought it was.

NUDE ELON MUSK: The invisible clothes I'm wearing are a product of xAthleisure, which will roll out self-dressing outfits within two years at the latest

THE CREDULOUS PRESS: Fully Clothed Tesla Innovator Does It Again

"The political ineptitude of the magnates of industry and finance was no less than that of the generals and led to the mistaken belief that if they coughed up large enough sums for Hitler he would be beholden to them."

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 237)

Thanks for the reposts the last couple of weeks 🙏

"AI has removed the developer bottleneck"

If developers really were your bottleneck, throwing developers at a problem would actually have worked in the past 20 years

"The problem is not agentic AI. The problem is developers not taking responsibility."

Ah, those pesky, irresponsible developers...

Full quote from the Lean Enterprise book

I feel this slide from Jez Humble's talks has become more relevant than ever.

It's not about generating bigger batches faster, but thinner slices validated sooner.

And that's what you get with "I don't need to understand the code I'm shipping to production, I can have guardrails instead".

If you don’t get that the code is influencing your mental model of the domain to the same extent your mental model is influencing the code, you’re in for a nasty ride that every linear, mechanistic, reductionist thinking encounters when trying to reduce complex reality to something it’s not.

"You don't need to understand the code you're shipping to production, you can have guardrails" is my new favourite mechanistic, linear way folks are trying to reduce complex reality to something it's not.

A friendly reminder that developers using agentic AI just add an abstraction onto this. At least a developer writing their own code still roughly understands the model they're writing. With Agentic AI, they don't and critically engaging with the model dilutes even more, and the model drifts more

I wonder how many folks jumped on the AI hype train scared of losing their jobs, which in turn drives the incentive not to be critical of it. I'd guess a lot.

Best CIs are dumb CIs.

Wait, so you're telling me that the biggest constraint of every product development team in the world is the amount of code it's able to generate in a unit of time and thus using heavy AI machinery will lead to higher throughput of value they create?

Right.

#toc

Each of these sad attempts is a load test for cyclomatic complexity analysis plugin

Like 100g chocolates that became 80g chocolates.
Inflation of price by reducing the included scope.

I'll stop calling it GenAI and call it The Mother of All Local Optimizations instead.

TMALO for the shorthand.