Cognitive Tours: Making Understanding a Deliverable in AI-Assisted Development

Margaret-Anne Storey

Generative AI and agentic coding are accelerating software development, leading to concerns about technical debt. But two less visible forms of debt, cognitive debt and intent debt, are emerging as key risks to software health. Cognitive debt is the absence or erosion of a team's shared understanding where no one can confidently explain how a system works or predict the impact of a change. Intent debt is the lack of clearly articulated goals, constraints, and rationale that explain what the system is for and guide how it should evolve. This paper presents Cognitive Tours, a tool designed to mitigate and repair cognitive and intent debt. Cognitive Tours is a web-based prototype for creating and following curated paths connecting user needs, design decisions, code, tests, and open questions. AI-assisted skills help audit existing waypoints and tours for possible problems or staleness and suggest candidates for new ones; humans decide what matters, verify relationships, and construct the narrative. This division of work deliberately preserves productive friction: the sensemaking involved in selecting, explaining, and revising a tour, which is intended to foster and share…