The Invisible Cost: From Creator to Consumer

Summary

Welcome to my Substack.This week marks my 10th anniversary as a Technical Consultant. Over the past decade—from struggling with my first lines of C++ to architecting complex legacy migrations—I have observed a recurring and worrying pattern in our industry.We are relentlessly pursuing “simplification” via high-level abstractions like Low-Code platforms and AI coding assistants. While these tools offer immediate speed, I believe they come with a hidden price tag—a crisis I call “Cognitive Leakage” (While the term exists in psychology, in the context of software evolution, I define it as the atrophy of mental models).In this article, I explore:The Law of Conservation of Cost: Why the effort you save today by taking a shortcut will be paid back with compound interest during future refactoring.The Creator-Consumer Singularity: How over-reliance on black-box tools degrades engineers from “Creators” into passive “Consumers” of their own systems.The Neuroscientific Evidence: How recent research (Kosmyna et al., 2025; Oakley et al., 2025) validates that outsourcing cognition leads to the atrophy of our mental models.This is not a rejection of AI, but a manifesto for maintaining “Cognitive Sovereignty” in an automated world.It has been exactly ten years since I started my internship at Thoughtworks during my junior year of university. To mark this milestone, I prepared this article.The inspiration for this piece came quite serendipitously. A few days ago, our project team held a Weekly Meeting where everyone was asked to introduce themselves. Two questions struck me to the core: “When did you write your first line of code?” and “How did you get to where you are today?”These questions plunged me into deep contemplation.I thought back to my university days and the embarrassment I felt during my first programming course, “C Programming Language.” Back then, I didn’t even understand what `printf` was or why a statement had to end with a semicolon. It wasn’t until later, when I d...