My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems.

Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems.

That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models.

I get to spend more time on my actual job.

That's a nice anecdote, and I agree with the sentiment - skill development comes from practice. It's tempting to see using AI as free lunch, but it comes with a cost in the form of skill atrophy. I reckon this is even the case when using it as an interactive encyclopedia, where you may lose some skill in searching and aggregating information, but for many people the overall trade off in terms of time and energy savings is worth it; giving them room to do more or other things.

This mirrors my experience exactly. We have to learn how to tame the beast.

> a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using Brandes-Köpf for node positioning.

I am sorry for being direct but you could have just kept it to the first part of that sentence. Everything after that just sounds like pretentious name dropping and adds nothing to your point.

But I fully agree, for complex problems that require insight, LLMs can waste your time with their sycophancy.

Is this a copilot ad?

Soapbox time.

They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.

We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.

And it's not even that machines are always better, they only have to be barely competent. People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.

We have about 30 years of the internet being widely adopted, which I think is roughly similar to AI in many ways (both give you access to data very quickly). Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).

> "they've always been wrong before"

In my opinion, they've almost always been right.

In the past two decades, we've seen the less-tech-savvy middle managers who devalued anything done on computer. They seemed to believe that doing graphic design or digital painting was just pressing a few buttons on the keyboard and the computer would do the job for you. These people were constantly mocked among online communities.

And strangely, in the end those tech muggles were the insightful ones.

Needs more research. Fully agree on that.

That said:

TV very much is the idiot box. Not necessarily because of the TV itself but rather whats being viewed. An actual engaging and interesting show/movie is good, but last time I checked, it was mostly filled with low quality trash and constant news bombardment.

Calculators do do arithmetic and if you ask me to do the kind of calculations I had to do in high school by hand today I wouldnt be able to. Simple calculations I do in my head but my ability to do more complex ones diminished. Thats down to me not doing them as often yes, but also because for complex ones I simply whip out my phone.

Not sure "they've always been wrong before" applies to TV being the idiot box and everything after

> 4 months is barely enough time to adapt to a fundamentally new tool

Yes, but also the extra wrinkle that this whole thing is moving so fast that 4 months old is borderline obsolete. Same into the future, any study starting now based on the state of the art on 22/01/2026 will involve models and potentially workflows already obsolete by 22/05/2026.

We probably can't ever adapt fully when the entire landscape is changing like that.

> Previous tools outsourced partial processes - calculators do arithmetic, Google stores facts. LLMs can potentially take over the entire cognitive process from thinking to formulating. That's qualitatively different.

Yes, but also consider that this is true of any team: All managers hire people to outsource some entire cognitive process, letting themselves focus on their own personal comparative advantage.

The book "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" is about Thomas Young, who died in 1829; since then, the sum of recorded knowledge has broadened too much for any single person to learn it all, so we need specialists, including specialists in managing other specialists.

AI is a complement to our own minds with both sides of this: Unlike us, AI can "learn it all", just not very well compared to humans. If any of us had a sci-fi/fantasy time loop/pause that let us survive long enough to read the entire internet, we'd be much more competent than any of these models, but we don't, and the AI runs on hardware which allows it to.

For the moment, it's still useful to have management skills (and to know about and use Popperian falsification rather than verification) so that we can discover and compensate for the weaknesses of the AI.

I think novels and tv are bad examples, as they are not substituting a process. The writing one is better.

Here’s the key difference for me: AI does not currently replace full expertise. In contrast, there is not a “higher level of storage” that books can’t handle and only a human memory can.

I need a senior to handle AI with assurances. I get seniors by having juniors execute supervised lower risk, more mechanical tasks for years. In a world where AI does that, I get no seniors.

> TV was the "idiot box."

TV is the uber idiot box, the overlord of the army of portable smart idiot boxes.

> The historical pattern suggests cognitive abilities shift rather than disappear.

Shift to what? This? https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

Were any of the prior fears totally wrong?

I think that is a VERY false comparison. As you say, LLMs try to take over entire cognitive and creative processes and that is a bigger problem then outsourcing arithmetic

> That said, I'm not sure "they've always been wrong before" proves they're wrong now.

I think a better framing would be "abusing (using it too much or for everything) any new tool/medium can lead to negative effects". It is hard to clearly define what is abuse, so further research is required, but I think it is a healthy approach to accept there are downsides in certain cases (that applies for everything probably).

"Socrates worried writing would destroy memory".

He may have been right... Maybe our minds work in a different way now.

If you realize that what we remember are the extremized strawman versions of the complaints then you can realize that they were not wrong.

Writing did eliminate the need for memorization. How many people could quote a poem today? When oral history was predominant, it was necessary in each tribe for someone to learn the stories. We have much less of that today. Writing preserves accuracy much more (up to conquerors burning down libraries, whereas it would have taken genocide before), but to hear a person stand up and quote Desiderata from memory is a touching experience to the human condition.

Scribes took over that act of memorization. Copying something lends itself to memorization. If you have ever volunteered extensively for project Gutenberg you can also witness a similar experience: reading for typos solidifies the story into your mind in a way that casual writing doesn't. In losing scribes we lost prioritization of texts and this class of person with intimate knowledge of important historical works. With the addition of copyright we have even lost some texts. We gained the higher availability of works and lower marginal costs. The lower marginal costs led to...

Pulp fiction. I think very few people (but I would be disappointed if it was no one) would argue that Dan Brown's da Vinci Code is on the same level as War and Peace. From here magazines were created, even cheaper paper, rags some would call them (or use that to refer to tabloids). Of course this also enabled newspapers to flourish. People started to read things for entertainment, text lost its solemnity. The importance of written word diminished on average as the words being printed became more banal.

TV and the internet led to the destruction of printed news, and so on. This is already a wall of text so I won't continue, but you can see how it goes:

Technology is a double edged sword, we may gain something but we also can and did lose some things. Whether it was progress or not is generally a normative question that often a majority agrees with in one sense or another but there are generational differences in those norms.

In the same way that overuse of a calculator leads to atrophy of arithmetic skills, overuse of a car leads to atrophy of walking muscles, why wouldn't overuse of a tool to write essays for you lead to atrophy of your ability to write an essay? The real reason to doubt the study is because its conclusion seems so obvious that it may be too easy for some to believe and hide poor statistical power or p-hacking.

None of the examples you provided were being sold as “intelligence”

How do we know they were wrong before?

> they've always been wrong before

Were they? It seems that often the fears came true, even Socrates’

I can relate to this.

Previously I had a mountain of things I'd have liked to do, but the reality of getting through the boring scaffolding to the interesting parts just wasn't worth it.

With LLMs, I can rapidly try things and I don't need to worry about the scaffolding. Even when the scaffolding wouldn't really have taken much time, but even 5-10 minutes of a mundane task could cause me to procrastinate on it forever.

Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. It’s more like having a reliable way to make fire — so we stop obsessing over sparks and start focusing on building something more important.

I can definitely relate to the abstract at least. While I am more productive now, and I am way more excited about working on longer term projects (especially by myself), I have found that the minutia is way more strenuous than it was before. I think that inhibits my ability to review what the LLM is producing.

I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD or anything but i also haven't been tested for it. It's something I have considered but I think it's pretty underdiagnosed in Spain.

Indeed, I feel like AI makes it less lonely to work, and for me, it's a net positive. It still has downsides for my focus, but that can be improved...

Can you elaborate on how you use AI for this? Do you do it for coding or for “everything?”

I am currently writing a paper and I am thinking exactly the same.

That must be how normal people feel.

I feel the same. Do you think this is because the ADHD brain has so many ideas or is it the same for neuro-normal people?

I'm not a fan of "TL;DR" but I think 52 minutes would qualify. I jumped to a random point of the transcript and found just platitudes, which didn't quite hook me into listening to all of it.

How about some more info on what their main conclusions are?

That'll lead to interesting results. I used a couple of LLM's for my blood bowl statistics, and they get rather simple math wrong. Which makes sense, they aren't build for math after all. It's wild how wrong they can get results though, I'd add the same prompt to 6 different AI's and they'd all get it wrong in 6 different ways.

On a side note, the most hilarious part of it was when I asked gemini to do something for me in Google Sheets and it kept refering to it as Excel. Even after I corrected it.

It's ok this is just the next level of human evolution. We haven't needed to know how to do basic math since the calculator. Nowadays our AIs can read and write for us too. More obsolete skills. We can focus on higher level things now. No more focusing on sparks, we can focus on building something important. We don't have an attention span over 5 seconds anyway thanks to social media. If you don't get where I'm coming from you probably don't have ADHD but that's fine.

It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another.

Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head. But they don't come into effect into any of those processes. So it's an immensely bad metaphor. A more apt one is the GPS, that only leaves you with practice.

That's where LLMs come in, and obliterate every single one of those pillars on any mental skill. You never have to learn a thing deeply, because it's doing the knowing for you. You never have to practice, because the LLM does all the writing for you. And of course, when it's wrong, you're not wrong. So nothing you learn.

There are ways to exploit LLMs to make your brain grow, instead of shrink. You could make them into personalized teachers, catering to each student at their own rhythm. Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions. Only employ them for tasks you already know how to make perfectly. Don't depend on them.

But this isn't the future OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna gift us. Not today, and not in a hundred years, because it's always gonna be more profitable to run a sycophant.

If we want LLMs to be the "better" instead of the "worse", we'll have to fight for it.

Smartphones I think did the most damage. Used to be you had to memorize people's phone numbers. I'm sure other things like memorizing how to get from your house to someone else is also less cognitive when the GPS just tells you every time, instead of you busting out a map, and thinking about your route. I've often found that if I preview a route I'm supposed to take, and use Google Street Maps to physically view key / unfamiliar parts of my route, I am drastically less likely to get lost, because "oh this looks familiar! I turn right here!"

My wife had a similar experience, she had some college project where they had to drive up and down some roads and write about it, it was a group project, and she bought a map, and noticed that after reading the map she was more knowledgeable about the area than her sister who also grew up in the same area.

I think AI is a great opportunity for learning more about your subjects in question from books, and maybe even the AI themselves by asking for sources, always validate your intel from more authoritative sources. The AI just saved you 10 minutes? You can spend those 10 minutes reading the source material.

The ability is still there. My son dutifully memorizes all the lyrics of his favorite band’s songs.

What the druids/piests were really decrying was that people spent less time and attention on them. Religion was the first attention economy.

This comment sounds like distraction from the topic. Analogy is plausible but is not the real thing.

Druids? Socrates was famously against books far earlier.

Funny enough, the reason he gave against books has now finally been addressed by LLMs.

Lukewarm opinions on the Internet? Where do you think we are...? We only deal in aboslutes here.

I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness.

It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time.

My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews through thinking tokens. The competitive nature of it keeps me focused, and it’s rewarding when I win with a faster or better solution.

Yes. My father never uses GPS at all. He memorized all the main roads in our city.

It's amazing to see how he navigates the city. But however amazing it is, he's only correct perhaps 95 times out of 100. And the number will only go down as he gets older. Meanwhile he has the 99.99% correct answer right in the front panel.

I think a big part of not knowing regularly taken routes is just over-reliance on GPS and subsequent self-doubt. When I am in a foreign city, I check the map on how to walk somewhere. I can easily remember some sequence of left and right turns. But in reality I still look again at the map and my position, to "make sure" I am still on the right track. Sometimes I check so often, that I become annoyed by this phone looking myself and then I intentionally try to not look for a while. It is stressful to follow the OCD or whatever to check at every turn. If I don't have to check at every turn or maybe call it sync my understanding of where I am with the position on the map, then I have more awareness of the surroundings and might even be able to enjoy the surroundings more and might even feel free to choose another, more interesting looking path.

For this experience I am not sure, whether people really don't know regularly taken routes, or they just completely lack the confidence in their familiarity with it.

I recall reading that over-reliance on GPS navigation is legitimately bad for your brain health.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

This is rather scary. Obviously, it makes me think of my own personal over-reliance on GPS, but I am really worried about a young relative of mine, whose car will remain stationary for as long as it takes to get a GPS lock... indefinitely.

I have ALWAYS had this problem. It's like my brain thinks places I frequent are unimportant details and ejects them to make room for other things.

I have to visit a place several times and with regularity to remember it. Otherwise, out it goes. GPS has made this a non-issue; I use it frequently.

For me, however, GPS didn't cause the problem. I was driving for 5 or 6 years before it became ubiquitous.

This is one I've never found really affects me - I think because I just always plan that the third or fourth time I go somewhere I won't use the navigation, so you are in a mindset of needing to remember the turns and which lane you should be in etc.

Not sure how that maps onto LLM use, I have avoided it almost completely because I've seen coleagues start to fall into really bad habits (like spending days adjusting prompts to try and get them to generate code that fixes an issue that we could have worked through together in about two hours), I can't see an equivalent way to not just start to outsource your thinking...

Some people have the ability to navigate with land markers quickly and some people don't.

I saw this first hand with coworkers. We would have to navigate large builds. I could easily find my way around while others did not know to take a left or right hand turn off the elevators.

That ability has nothing to do with GPS. Some people need more time for their navigation skills to kick in. Just like some people need to spend more time on Math, Reading, Writing, ... to be competent compared to others.

Thanks - macroexpanded:

Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277 - June 2025 (426 comments)

Like with asbesthos and lead paint, we are building surprises today for the people of tomorrow!

And asbestos and lead paint was actually useful.

If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this:

As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.

In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.

Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.

Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.

Hopefully the brainrot will mean older developers, who know how to code the old-fashioned way, don't get replaced so quickly..

It'll be a lot like giving children all the answers without teaching them how to get the answers for themselves.

Most people will continue to become dumber. Some people will try to embrace and adapt. They will become the power-stupids. Others will develop a sort of immune reaction to AI and develop into a separate evolutionary family.

I think LLMs can be great for learning, but not if you're using them to do work for you. I find them most valuable for explaining concepts I've been trying to learn, but have gotten stuck and am struggling to find good resources for.

> I think the opposite, they're great for skipping 'learning' and just get the results. yes, and cars skip the hours of walking, planes skip weeks of swimming, calculators skip the calculating ...

Without the engagement on the material you are studying you will not have the context to know and therefore focus on the larger problem. Deep immersion in the material allows you to make the connections. With AI spoon feeding you will not have that immersion.

I find it very useful for code comprehension. For writing code it still struggles (at least codex) and sometimes I feel I could have written the code myself faster rather than correct it every time it does something wrong.

Jeremy Howard argues that we should use LLMs to help us learn, once you let it reason for you then things go bad and you start getting cognitive debt. I agree with this.

AI is not a great partner to code with. For me I just use it to do some boilerplates and fill in the tedious gaps. Even for translations its bad if you know both languages. The biggest issues is that AI constantly tries to steer you wrong, its very subtle in programming that you only realize it a week later when you get stuck in a vibe coding quagmire.

"What you said just now isn't true at all and you should reconsider the premise"

"Exactly!"

Definitely, but it won't be a creation of any known AI companies, anytime soon. I have a hard time to see how this would be profitable.

It also goes against the main ethos of the AI sect to "stress-test" the AI against everything and everyone, so there's that.

What does using a chat agent have to do with psychosis? I assume this was also the case when people googled their health results, googled their gym advice and googled for research paper summaries?

As long as you're vetting your results just like you would any other piece of information on the internet then it's an evolution of data retrieval.

Pathologising those who disagree with a current viewpoint follows a long and proud tradition. "Possessed by demons" of yesteryear, today it's "AI psychosis".

Doesn't look like anything to me

When you're done, let us know so we can aggregate your summarized comment with the rest of the thread comments to back out key, human informed, findings.

Agreed. "Reduced muscle development in farmers using a tractor mounted plow: Over four months, mechanical plow users consistently underperformed at lifting weights with respect to the control group who had been using spades. These results raise concerns about the long-term implications of tractor mounted plow reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into tractor mounted plow role in farming."

I love the parts where they point out that human evaluators gave wildly different evaluations as compared to an AI evaluator, and openly admitted they dislike a more introverted way of writing (fewer flourishes, less speculation, fewer random typos, more to the point, more facts) and prefer texts with a little spunk in it (= content doesn't ultimately matter, just don't bore us.)

> what's state management? what's this hook? who cares

Incidentally how I feel about React regardless of LLMs. Putting Claude on top is just one more incomprehensible abstraction.

It's just a different way of writing code. Today you at least need to understand best practices to help steer towards a good architecture. In the near future there will be no developers needed at all for the majority of apps.

I hate it, but I'm actually counting on this and how it affects my future earning potential as part of my early(ish) retirement plan!

I do use them, and I also still do some personal projects and such by hand to stay sharp.

Just: they can't mint any more "pre-AI" computer scientists.

A few outliers might get it and bang their head on problems the old way (which is what, IMO, yields the problem-solving skills that actually matter) but between:

* Not being able to mint any more "pre-AI" junior hires

And, even if we could:

* Great migration / Covid era overhiring and the corrective layoffs -> hiring freezes and few open junior reqs

* Either AI or executives' misunderstandings of it and/or use of it as cover for "optimization" - combined with the Nth wave of offshoring we're in at the moment -> US hiring freezes and few open junior reqs

* Jobs and tasks junior hires used to cut their teeth on to learn systems, processes, etc. being automated by AI / RPA -> "don't need junior engineers"

The upstream "junior" source for talent our industry needs has been crippled both quantitatively and qualitatively.

We're a few years away from a _massive_ talent crunch IMO. My bank account can't wait!

Yes, yes. It's analogous to our wizzardly greybeard ancestors prophesying that youngsters' inability to write ASM and compile it in their heads would bring end of days, or insert your similar story from the 90s or 2000s here (or printing press, or whatever).

Order of "dumbing down" effect in a space that one way or another always eventually demands the sort of functional intelligence that only rigorous, hard work on hard problems can yield feels completely different, though?

Just my $0.02, I could be wrong.

Yup. This.

no, that isn't accurate. One of the key points is that those previously relying on the LLM still showed reduced cognitive engagement after switching back to unaided writing.

> Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market

I hope you’re being facetious, as otherwise that’s a selfish view which will come back to bite you. If you live in a society, what other do and how they behave affects you too.

A John Green quote on public education feels appropriate:

> Let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools even though I personally don’t have a kid in school. It’s because I don’t like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.