Understanding is the new bottleneck — Geoffrey Litt, Notion

Litt names the problem most of us feel but haven't articulated: agents write code faster than we build understanding of it, and that gap — he calls it cognitive debt — eventually blocks you from contributing ideas at all. Rather than a lament, he offers three concrete techniques you can adopt this week: AI-generated explanation documents with quizzes, custom 'micro-worlds' that visualize your specific system, and shared spaces where humans and agents build collective understanding.

• Cognitive debt works like technical debt: let your understanding of the system degrade long enough and you lose the ability to participate creatively, not just to verify correctness.
• Have agents write throwaway code whose purpose isn't shipping — custom debuggers and ephemeral simulations built purely so you understand your own system better.
• Auto-generated quizzes at the end of AI explanations act as a speed governor: you can't move on until you've actually absorbed the material.
• Structure AI explanations deliberately: context first, intuition before detail, and 'literate code diffs' presented in reading order rather than file order.

Part of Issue Nº 001: LLMs for judgment, code for counting: scaling to 500K sensors on 300x fewer tokens