Understand to participate

According to Simon Willison, developer Geoffrey Litt made a key observation at the AI Engineer World's Fair: to collaborate effectively with AI coding agents, you must understand the code deeply. Litt warns against 'cognitive debt'—the knowledge gap that opens when your understanding of how the code actually works drifts from reality. Without a rich mental model, you can't think creatively about the next steps. You shift from active collaborator to passive observer. Litt's full talk is available on YouTube, along with over three hundred other conference sessions.

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