[skybrian]

Sometimes people make an assumption that every codebase has a team (or at least a single person) devoted to maintaining it. Companies with large codebases may not be able to afford that, or don't think it's worthwhile. You could have dozens or hundreds of libraries and only a few maintainers. The libraries are effectively "done" until something comes up. Work on them is interrupt-driven.

In that situation, coming in cold to a library that you haven't worked on before to make a change is the normal case, not "cognitive debt."

If you have common coding standards that all your libraries abide by, then it's much easier to dive into a new one.

Also, being able to ask an AI questions about an unfamiliar library might actually help?

[m3047]

In my opinion and experience that "normal" case is cognitive debt. Not having coding standards enforced: cognitive as well as technical debt. Missing / incorrect documentation. Uncertainty of provenance and what's actually running in production and how it gets there.

That's what you get in the "normal" case, and since the default attitude going into such situations should be Trust Nothing, if there was an LLM there I'd consult it. Magic 8-Ball, too. Rubber ducky? (Not that rubber ducky.) (I once wrote a dependency analyzer / oracle for PHP... in Perl.)