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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#291

Post by deadbabe »

mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

I think a good rule of thumb is, only have AI write some code when you know exactly what it should look like and are just too lazy to type it out, or, if it is code that you would have otherwise just pulled down from some open source library and not written yourself anyway.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#292

Post by nospice »

lukeinator42 wrote: post #280

I think it's worth looking at this commentary on the study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00856 . It aligns with a lot of our intuitions, but the study should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

I'm going to lose my mind. This commentary is almost certainly LLM generated.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#293

Post by theblazehen »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #225
carterschonwald wrote: post #86

idk, if anything I’m thinking more. The idea that I might be able to build everything I’ve ever planned out. At least the way I’m using them, it’s like the perfect assistive device for my flavor of ADHD — I get an interactive notebook I can talk through crazy stuff with. No panacea for sure, but I’m so much higher functioning it’s surreal. I’m not even using em in the volume many folks claim, more like pair programmi…

Interesting. I feel like it makes my ADHD worse. If I code “manually” then I can enter hyperfocus/flow and it’s relaxing. If I use AI to code then I have to sit around waiting for it to respond and I get distracted and start something else, forgetting what I was doing before. Maybe there’s a better workflow for me though.

Try running multiple agents - more task switching overhead, but I find planning in one agent while another is executing is a good balance for me, and avoids the getting-distracted trap

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#294

Post by anthonypasq »

mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

seems like the actual issue is that you were using a Copilot IDE plugin.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#295

Post by vidarh »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #248
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right that a dev's job is to solve problems. However, one loses a lot of that if one doesn't think in computerese - and only reading code isn't enough. One has to write code to understand code. So for one to do one's _actual_ job, they cannot depend solely on "AI" to write all the code.

We used to say that about people who wrote in C instead of assembler. Then we used to say that (any many still do) about people who opted for "scripting languages" over "systems languages".

It's "true" in a sense. It helps. But it is also largely irrelevant for most of us, in that most of us are writing code you can learn to read and write in a tiny proportion of the time we spend in working life. The notion that you need to keep spending more than a tiny fraction of your time writing code in order to understand enough to be able to solve business problem will seem increasingly quaint.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#296

Post by footy »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #177
Archer6621 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 savin…

If the computer was the bicycle for the mind, then perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind? Gets you there, but doesn't necessarily help build the best healthy habits. Trade offs around "room to do more of other things" are an interesting and recurring theme of these conversations. Like two opposites of a spectrum. On one end the ideal process oriented artisan taking the long way to mastery, on the other end…

> then perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind

I have a whole half-written blog post about how LLMs are the cars of the mind. Massive externalities, has to be forced on people, leads to cognitive/health issues instead of improving cognition and health.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#297

Post by anthonypasq »

saberience wrote: post #264
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing didn't destroy memory, it externalised it and made it stable and shareable. That was absolutely transformative, and far more useful than being able to re-improvise a once-upon-a-time heroic poem from memory. It hugely enhanced synthetic and contextual memory, which was a huge development. AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has t…

It did destroy memory though. I would bet any amount of money that our memories in 2026 are far, far worse than they were in 1950 or 1900. In fact, I can feel my memory is easily worse now than from before ChatGPT's release, because we are doing less hard cognitive work. The less we use our brain's the dumber we get, and we are definitely using our brains less now.

we existing in a stunningly more abstract and complex society than we did even 100 years. Unless you are reasonably intelligent its incredibly difficult to even navigate the modern world.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#298

Post by anthonypasq »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #225
carterschonwald wrote: post #86

idk, if anything I’m thinking more. The idea that I might be able to build everything I’ve ever planned out. At least the way I’m using them, it’s like the perfect assistive device for my flavor of ADHD — I get an interactive notebook I can talk through crazy stuff with. No panacea for sure, but I’m so much higher functioning it’s surreal. I’m not even using em in the volume many folks claim, more like pair programmi…

Interesting. I feel like it makes my ADHD worse. If I code “manually” then I can enter hyperfocus/flow and it’s relaxing. If I use AI to code then I have to sit around waiting for it to respond and I get distracted and start something else, forgetting what I was doing before. Maybe there’s a better workflow for me though.

you gotta use faster models, this is the next big leap in agentic coding. In 2 years we will have opus 4.5 at 1000 tokens/sec and it will be glorious.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#299

Post by mikemarsh »

DocTomoe wrote: post #48
falloutx wrote: post #20

I think a lot more people, especially at the higher end of the pay scale, are in some kind of AI psychosis. I have heard people at work talk about how they are using chatGPT to quick health advice, some are asking it for gym advice and others are just saying they just dump entire research reports into it and get the summary.

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

It's not about "Pathologising those who disagree", it's about how demonic influence (which anyone can fall victim to) _actually_ works.

You've highlighted a very real equivalency in spite of yourself.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#300

Post by vidarh »

wiseowise wrote: post #258
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the computer was the bicycle for the mind, then perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind? Gets you there, but doesn't necessarily help build the best healthy habits. Trade offs around "room to do more of other things" are an interesting and recurring theme of these conversations. Like two opposites of a spectrum. On one end the ideal process oriented artisan taking the long way to mastery, on the other end…

> perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind More like mobility scooter for disabled. Literally Wall-E in the making.

This is the typical arrogance of developers not seeing the value in anything but the coding. I've been hands on for 45 years, but also spend 25 of those dealing with architecture and larger systems design. The actual programming is by far the simplest part of designing a large system. Outsourcing it is only dumbing you down if you don't spend the time it frees up to move up the value chain.
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