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

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Druids? Socrates was famously against books far earlier.

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

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.

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.

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 ...

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 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.

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.

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.

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".

Yes. Similar to the mass psychosis we were hearing about during COVID in relation to asking particular questions and demonstrating curiosity about controversial topics.

Seems to have somehow been replaced with this AI psychosis?

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.