Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#11

Post by rokhayakebe » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

AnEro wrote: post #6

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and…

We had Mental Math sessions in class. The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#12

Post by MSkill1 » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#13

Post by erelong » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

imo no way

But this varies from person to person

Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#14

Post by NguyenDat377 » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

Personally, I use AI to learn more about Backend Engineering actually, so it's fine for me. Beside I can also use AI to suggest and it's me verifying the idea so that's a no for me

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#15

Post by throw10920 » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

> Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent.

...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#16

Post by iLoveOncall » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

If you offload any of your thinking to AI, you're offloading too much of your thinking to AI.

Offload your execution, not your thinking.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#17

Post by helterskelter » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

AnEro wrote: post #6

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and…

OT, but if we made kids learning math use log tables and slide rules for all their calculations I expect that they would engage their brains more and actually think about what they were doing, ie: form a strategy to solve a problem before they started calculating. Also I think that they would get a better "feel" for working numbers in general. I have no evidence, but I suspect that by abstracting away a lot of the "gruntwork" of calculating, we've really hampered people's development in math.

Unfortunately this adds quite a bit of overhead and would make everything take a lot more time. It might be worth it though.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#18

Post by jmole » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #8

Having a very dangerous AI standoff at work, where people are debating wether or not to use a particular connection pooling / threading strategy to fix a production issue, and everyone is unqualified to answer and is instead arguing what their agent said. They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation. No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavi…

honestly sounds like you have too many unqualified employees. best case scenario though, they all come out of this having learned a little bit more.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#19

Post by brazzy » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

zloy88 wrote: post #4

Maybe it's a way of perspective. I adore to use AI to actually learn, so I don't feel like I offload thinking. I use AI to do all the research which earlier I did manual through google search. I still make my own decisions, I just let Claude spoon feed me all infos I want and need. Feels great man

This is also now the first thing that I find it truly useful for in a non-coding role: researching how to do things in Azure, which I have not used before.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#20

Post by sebastianconcpt » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

MSkill1 wrote: post #12

I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.

Is a good thing depending on which ones. And our taste on what to specialize our judgment into varies a lot. One thing I do use as criteria to detect it can be a problem is in lack of understanding and lack of control of the layers that are part of verifications and diagnosing power.