I help software orgs get things done without shooting themselves in the foot. Technologist, technical coach, tech lead, software crafter, legacy code wrestler.
Also, boardgames 🎲
| About me | https://about.me/jo.vaneyck |
| Blog | https://jvaneyck.wordpress.com/ |
| Youtube | https://www.youtube.com/jovaneyck |
| Github | https://github.com/jovaneyck |
Lots of teams are shipping changes faster than they can understand.
This gap is cognitive debt; and it compounds quickly, especially with AI coding agents in the picture. Let's look at 5 techniques I apply to stay in touch.
Tony Hoare passed away.
This quote stuck with me since I first read it as a teen. It sparked a decade-long obsession with simplicity, later expanded by Rich Hickey's Simple vs Easy.
"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare#The_Emperor's_Old_Clothes
Comprehension Debt: The Hidden Tax on AI-Generated Code
AI coding tools are shifting the bottleneck from writing code to understanding it. The gap between what your codebase contains and what your team actually comprehends is growing silently. We have a name for it now: comprehension debt. Unlike technical debt, it doesn't announce itself through friction. It breeds false confidence. And your current quality gates won't catch it. We've identified a real and growing…
https://jvaneyck.wordpress.com/2026/03/21/comprehension-debt-the-hidden-tax-on-ai-generated-code/
Fast automated quality checks are even more essential when we're drinking from the code-generating firehose if we're to avoid testing and code review bottlenecks being overwhelmed.
But just how good are those checks?
https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/the-ai-ready-software-developer-22-test-your-tests/
"You don't get expertise from a book. You get it from failing and learning."
If you're an engineering leader, this video is well worth 4 1/2 minutes of your time.
The AI Coding Maturity Ladder: Do Your Reps Before You Scale
There's a pattern I see constantly when coaching software engineers on AI-augmented workflows. Someone reads about multi-agent orchestration, installs a bleeding-edge framework, spins up five parallel agents, and within an hour has a codebase full of plausible-looking code that doesn't quite work, isn't tested, and follows no coherent design. They skipped the ladder.
The Shape of Things to Come: What’s Actually Happening in AI-Augmented Coding Early 2026
The AI coding landscape is undergoing significant change, with advancements in multi-step code generation tools and innovative frameworks like the Ralph Wiggum loop and Beads. These developments shift the role of software developers from active coding to oversight and verification, emphasizing increased autonomy and efficiency in coding practices.
As we use coding agents to author code rather than people, many questions arise about where software engineers fit, how we achieve quality outcomes, and how we train juniors.
The answer lies in reversing the trend to merge the roles of programmer and coder. Whilst agents take on the role of the coder, the role of a programmer in creating the program's theory remains with a human if we want to avoid cognitive debt and low quality.
Coding is Dead, Long Live Programming: https://write.as/ian-cooper/coding-is-dead-long-live-programming
Lucie / minute
Timo Tijhof
Jason Gorman
alexboly
Ian Cooper