Coding Fast and Slow: Applying Kahneman's Insights to Improve Development Practices and Efficiency

Abstract

Context destruction is invisible. You don’t feel it happen. You don’t know when you’re depleted. You don’t see the OK code you produce. Neither do your reviewers or your pipelines. The first person who notices is your customer. This talk applies Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s System 1/System 2 framework to developer productivity. Through interactive experiments — cognitive puzzles, code reviews under distraction, and the Stroop effect — you’ll experience context depletion firsthand. Then we’ll trace the invisible chain from context destruction through OK code to production, backed by research proving that interruptions reliably degrade work quality and people cannot detect the drop (Foroughi et al., 2014 & 2016). The solution is Context Engineering across four dimensions: Personal (manage your fuel), Organizational (protect your team’s fuel), Technological (automate context protection), and AI (teach AI agents your context so you stop babysitting them). Because you can’t detect depletion — so stop causing it.