My "actual job" is a designer, not a career engineer, so for me code has always been how I ship. AI makes that separation clearer now. I just recently wrote about this.[0]
But I think the cognitive debt framing is useful: reading and approving code is not the same as building the mental model you get from writing, probing, and breaking things yourself. So the win (more time on problem solving) only holds if you're still intentionally doing enough of the concrete work to stay anchored in the system.
That said, if you're someone like me, I don't always need to fully master everything, but I do need to stay close enough to reality that I'm not shipping guesses.
But I think the cognitive debt framing is useful: reading and approving code is not the same as building the mental model you get from writing, probing, and breaking things yourself. So the win (more time on problem solving) only holds if you're still intentionally doing enough of the concrete work to stay anchored in the system.
That said, if you're someone like me, I don't always need to fully master everything, but I do need to stay close enough to reality that I'm not shipping guesses.
[0] https://alisor.substack.com/p/i-never-really-wrote-code-now-...