◇ Could this help me?
Yes. Cognitive coverage is a genuinely useful framing because it names something real and currently unmeasured: teams track how much of their code is tested but have no equivalent for how much of it anyone understands, and that gap widens fast when generation is cheap. The accompanying claim that foundations matter more rather than less is also right, since reviewing and debugging unfamiliar code demands more conceptual grasp than writing it yourself did. General practice, with the executive framing discounted: the specific picture of one person managing a thousand agents is rhetoric, and the useful part is the measurement idea underneath it.
I want to measure how much of this codebase I actually understand, not just how much of it is tested. Go through the repository and, for each significant module, ask me to explain in my own words what it does, why it exists, and what would break if it were removed. Score my answers honestly rather than encouragingly, and produce a map of the codebase marked by where my understanding is solid, shaky, or absent. For the absent areas, tell me the shortest path to understanding each one and what specifically I should read or trace first.