Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

But this doesn't seem to make sense when someone comes to a topic with an LLM in-hand. They need to know high-level techniques, architecture, best practice, etc. As they pursue the topic they start to get down into the details, although probably never learn to do it fully independently.

I quite like this view because it paints a somewhat optimistic way forward from where we are now.

With writing:

Things like brainstorming a plot line for a book with a custom GPT or Claude project that has all of my prior books in its knowledge? Works great.

Things like asking it to write a paragraph or chapter for me - I can rapidly feel my own writing skill, motivation, vocabulary, and ability to grasp/remember the resulting plotlines deteriorating. I don't use it for that anymore.

With studying:

I've been taking a couple of evening uni courses and the thing I found so great is that I've been forcing myself to think through the problems, and take my own notes in every lecture. I may then still get ChatGPT to help explain and reason through some of the concepts with me. And I have it review and 'grade' my assignments. But I refuse to ask it to start drafting answers.

With programming:

This one is tougher. When I am not very personally invested in a problem or codebase it becomes too easy to offload more parts to Claude, and when the company encourages 'vibing' to speed up velocity and you're reviewing and writing a higher influx of lower quality PRs, investment goes down. I still sometimes catch myself committing solutions I only _mostly_ grasp and the rest is hand-waving. A big part of it is a work culture thing.

For my own projects I make sure to understand and have a back-and-forth with the planning agent for each task, or write the first plan myself to go off of. When it comes to producing the code, I have to admit it is much easier to properly review parts of the codebase I am extra interested and knowledgeable in (backend in my case). The frontend I'm less well versed in and also admittedly less interested in, so I do sometimes fall into the trap of "Ehh it works, just commit it" with the goal of doing a thorough quality pass before actual release.

With all of the above, I can feel my ability to think, plan, reason, focus (and my vocabulary) suffer if I go over the line too much into agent offloading. For me keeping that balance is as much about maintaining my own long-term brain health as it is about producing good output. I imagine younger people growing up with AI today won't even know what that more capable (in my opinion) brain state feels like - to them, the AI-using brain will be the norm.

As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful anyway. I think if I had access to AI from a younger age, I'd have used it to skip learning the things I didn't care about, which would not have done me any favours.

Maybe not traditional meditation, but I have no problem taking a 30 minute plus walk with nothing but my thoughts. It’s actually when I do most of my thinking. The other is in the shower/sauna where devices don’t work anyway.