Cognitive Load

Maybe it's age, but I'm getting worse at processing multiple streams at once.

Sitting at a bar, typing a reply I forgot to send. The bartender starts chatting. A conversation drifts over from the table behind me. This is genuinely hard now. Any one of these is fine. All at once and the system falls behind.

I see something similar when AI writes code.

REST APIs use snake_case. Application code uses camelCase. SQL uses snake_case again. Keeping these consistent across a generated codebase is brutal. Especially when humans have stacked implicit conversions everywhere to save themselves trouble. The framework silently transforms keys. The ORM applies its own mapping. Nobody can tell what becomes what, where.

ORMs were built for humans. An abstraction for people who didn't want to write SQL. But an AI doesn't mind counting placeholder ? marks. The heavy, implicit frameworks we piled up to make our own lives easier are now cognitive load for the machine.

Maybe that kind of thing starts to fade. Not back to CGI, but simple, unglamorous code turns out to be fast and correct. And compiled languages with long feedback loops become a real drag. Typed languages you can run immediately—Go, TypeScript—keep winning. I think about this while the AI writes today's web code for me.