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zakirullin/cognitive-load: 🧠 Cognitive Load In Software Development

github.com · 5,825 words · saved by 1 readers

There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not a fancy imaginary concept, it can't be misleading - cognitive load is there, and we can feel it. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code. Cognitive load is how much a developer needs to think in order to complete a task. We should reduce the cognitive load in our projects as much as possible. When reading code, you put things like values of variables, control flow logic and call sequences into your head. The average person can hold roughly four such things in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, a significant effort is required to understand things. Let's say w

Cognitive load is what matters For AI agents | Blog | Chinese | Japanese | Spanish | Korean | Turkish | Brazilian Portuguese | Vietnamese | Nepali It is a living document, last update: June 2026. Introduction There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but most of them have failed. They failed because they were imagined, not real. These ideas were based on aesthetics and subjective judgments. We need something more fundamental, something that can't be wrong. Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive l

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