CONCEPT
Slot Allocation
The cognitive politics of working memory in the AI age — the question of who decides what fills the seven slots freed by compression, and whether those decisions are made by the human, the tool's interaction patterns, or the organization's metrics.
Every decision a human makes about what to attend to is, in Miller's framework, a decision about slot allocation. Working memory has seven slots. The world presents thousands of simultaneous demands. Filling a slot with one item is necessarily and inescapably refusing to fill it with every other possible item. Attention is not merely selective; it is sacrificial.
The promise of AI coding assistants is that compressing implementation frees slots for higher-level concerns — architecture, design, user experience, ethics, strategy. The promise is real. But Miller's framework reveals a complication: freed slots do not allocate themselves. They are allocated by the same cognitive system that was previously overwhelmed — a system with habits, defaults, and biases formed in a world where the freed slots did not exist. A developer who spent ten years allocating five slots to implementation does not, upon having those slots freed, spontaneously allocate them to architectural thinking. She allocates them to whatever