flâneur

zakirullin/cognitive-load: 🧠 Cognitive Load is what matters

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

There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but most of them have failed. 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 load. It's not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It's not imagined, it's 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. 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 chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things. Let's say we have been asked to make some fixes

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

related reading