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Why AI Code Fails Without Understanding: Cognitive and Intent Debt in Practice

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About this event

What to expect

This online talk addresses one of the most pressing challenges in AI-assisted software development: the hidden costs that accumulate when teams lose understanding of their own code. While AI tools can generate working code faster than ever, they often create systems that nobody truly comprehends—leading to what speaker Margaret-Anne Storey calls "cognitive debt" and "intent debt."

What You'll Learn

Margaret-Anne Storey will introduce the Triple Debt Model, a framework that extends beyond traditional technical debt to help teams reason about software health in the age of AI-generated code. The session explores why understanding and intent matter more than ever when ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and other AI coding assistants are writing significant portions of your codebase.

Key topics include:

  • Cognitive Debt: When teams can no longer understand what their systems do or how they work
  • Intent Debt: When the original reasoning behind design decisions is lost or never captured
  • Recognition Signals: Practical indicators that these issues are affecting your projects
  • Mitigation Strategies: How to design development practices that preserve understanding even when AI writes the code

Why This Matters

As generative AI transforms software development, the bottleneck is shifting from code production to code comprehension. Teams using AI coding tools often find themselves with working systems they cannot maintain, debug, or evolve—because the shared understanding that makes collaboration possible has eroded. This talk provides a conceptual framework and practical guidance for navigating this new reality.

About the Speaker

Margaret-Anne Storey is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria and Canada Research Chair in the Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering. Her research focuses on developer experience, program comprehension, and the impact of generative AI on software development practices—making her uniquely qualified to address how AI is reshaping not just how we write code, but how we think about it.

Who Should Attend

This event is ideal for software developers, engineering managers, tech leads, and anyone working with AI coding assistants who wants to build more maintainable systems. Whether you're shipping production code generated by AI tools or managing teams adopting these technologies, understanding cognitive and intent debt will help you

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