AI coding glossary: what cognitive debt, brain fry and 6 more terms mean

Being asked to approve so often that you stop reading what you approve. Anthropic uses the term for Claude Code's permission prompts: users accept 93% of them, and over time "people stop paying close attention to what they're approving" (Anthropic Engineering). In one developer's words: "Type 'continue'. Approve a bash command I didn't read" (r/ClaudeAI).

Read more: Should you use --dangerously-skip-permissions in Claude Code?

To rubber-stamp is "to process, approve or decide matters routinely rather than through careful consideration" (Wiktionary). With agents it means accepting a diff, a plan or a pull request because it is there, not because you checked it. It is where approval fatigue ends up. Simon Willison's rule against it: he won't commit code he "couldn't explain exactly what it does to somebody else" (Simon Willison).

Read more: Should you use --dangerously-skip-permissions in Claude Code?

Losing a skill you no longer practise because a tool does it for you. Lisanne Bainbridge wrote in 1983 that "physical skills deteriorate when they are not used" (Ironies of Automation). Deskilling is the same thing at the level of a job: "AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them" drew 686 points on Hacker News on 30 October 2026 (Hacker News).

The clearest test on code is a randomized trial from Anthropic: 52 mostly junior developers learning a new Python library. Those with an AI assistant scored 50% on a quiz afterwards, those without 67%. Those who asked conceptual questions or asked for explanations with the code scored 65% or more (Anthropic).

Read more: Is AI making us dumber? What the studies say about developers

The cost you pay later for thinking you skipped now, by analogy with technical debt. The term comes from the MIT Media Lab paper "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task". Over four months, "LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" (arXiv). It is a preprint about 54 people writing essays, not code.

Developers now use it for code they shipped but no longer understand. Simon Willison wrote a chapter on how to "fight back against cognitive debt" (X).

Read more: Your Brain on ChatGPT: what the MIT study says about coding

Mental fatigue from heavy use of AI tools, or from constantly watching over them. BCG researchers named it in Harvard Business Review on 5 March 2026, from a study of 1,488 US workers at large companies, and found it "can increase employee errors, decision overload, and, ultimately, intent to quit" (BCG, Harvard Business Review). The article quotes an early user of a tool that runs many Claude Code agents at once: "Gas Town was moving too fast for me."

Read more: Is AI making us dumber? What the studies say about developers

Trusting an automated suggestion over your own check, so you miss what it misses or follow it when it is wrong. In Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey's 2010 review, automation bias leads to "both omission and commission errors when decision aids are imperfect", and "occurs in both naive and expert participants, cannot be prevented by training or instructions" (Human Factors). With agents it looks like taking the first fix or plan because it sounds sure.

Read more: Should you use --dangerously-skip-permissions in Claude Code?

When a system runs itself, the person watching it loses the feel and the skill to take over when it fails. Bainbridge's "Ironies of Automation" (1983) made the point first: the operator is left to monitor, yet "it is impossible for even a highly motivated human being to maintain effective visual attention towards a source of information on which very little happens, for more than about half an hour" (Automatica).

Mica Endsley and Esin Kiris named it "the out-of-the-loop performance problem" in 1995, and traced it to lost skills and lost situation awareness when people shift "from active to passive information processing" (Human Factors). With agents it is the long run with no message from you, and the moment you have to step back in.

Read more: Is AI making us dumber? What the studies say about developers

Building software by prompting and accepting what the AI writes without reading the code. Andrej Karpathy named it on 2 February 2025: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials" (X).

Simon Willison drew the line: if an LLM wrote the code and "you then reviewed it, tested it thoroughly and made sure you could explain how it works to someone else", that is not vibe coding (Simon Willison).

Read more: Your Brain on ChatGPT: what the MIT study says about coding