Five independent researchers named the same problem within six weeks of each other. They are calling it cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system's evolving structure and a team's shared understanding of how and why that system works. Unlike technical debt, cognitive debt is silent. The tests pass. Features ship. The system runs. But the shared theory of why it works the way it does is fragmenting faster than anyone expected. AI makes it exponentially worse because it generates structure faster than shared understanding can stabilize. The structural response is knowledge compression. Not documentation written after the fact. Living artifacts that capture the theory of the system as it is built. Decision logs, lifecycle maps, compressed commit histories, architecture blueprints that update when features ship. The sixth layer of the AgenticOps framework may be the most important one.
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