The Ironies of AI Coding: Combating Cognitive Debt with Visual PRs
With the advent of AI coding agents, multi-thousand-line Pull Requests are becoming the new normal. The models are churning out massive amounts of code, and keeping up is getting exponentially harder. Because I don’t have a granular understanding of every single line being merged, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to generate accurate mental models of the system’s new features. For humans, mental models are everything. We need context and an adequate knowledge of the system to reason about new architecture, confidently add features, or know exactly where to look when a production bug inevitably surfaces. ...