Design-First Collaboration

I've heard the term cognitive debt being bandied about. Having to deal with larger PRs, especially with a good deal of AI-generated code can be taxing.

This, I believe, is why reviewing AI-generated code feels so much more exhausting than reviewing a colleague's work. When a human pair submits code after a whiteboarding session, I am reviewing implementation against a design I already understand and agreed to. When AI generates code from a single prompt, I am simultaneously evaluating scope (did it build what I needed?), architecture (are the component boundaries right?), integration (does it fit our existing infrastructure?), contracts (are the interfaces correct?), and code quality (is the implementation clean?) — all at once, all entangled.

That is too many dimensions of judgment for a single pass. The brain is not built for it. Things get missed — not because I am careless, but because I am overloaded.