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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

#491

Post by ASalazarMX »

jackblemming wrote: post #406
ASalazarMX wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your job has turned into designing solutions, and asking a (sometimes unreliable) LLM to make them for you. If you keep at it, soon you'll accumulate enough cognitive debt to become a fossil, knowing what has to be done, but not quite how it is done.

So no different than management up to the CEO who simply “delegate” to the underlyings?

Exactly. A manager or CEO won't call themselves software engineers. If we change our role similarly in the development cycle, neither should we.

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

#492

Post by vidarh »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #357
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.

Then your job has turned into designing solutions, and asking a (sometimes unreliable) LLM to make them for you. If you keep at it, soon you'll accumulate enough cognitive debt to become a fossil, knowing what has to be done, but not quite how it is done.

Do you know how to write the code you write in assembler instead of a higher level language? How many of your peers do?

Most "know what has to be done, but not quite how it is done". This is just another level of abstraction.

I learnt the lesson 30+ years ago that while it was (and still occasionally is) useful to understand the principles of assembly, it had become useless to write assembly outside of a few narrow niches. A decade later I moved from C and C++ to higher level languages again.

Moving up the abstraction levels is learning leverage.

I deliver far more now - with or without AI - than I did when I wrote assembler, or C for that matter. I deliver more again with AI than without.

That's what matters.

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

#493

Post by vidarh »

asdff wrote: post #363
ASalazarMX wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your job has turned into designing solutions, and asking a (sometimes unreliable) LLM to make them for you. If you keep at it, soon you'll accumulate enough cognitive debt to become a fossil, knowing what has to be done, but not quite how it is done.

And really where is your moat? Why pay for a senior when a junior can prompt an LLM all the same? People are acting like its juniors who are going to be out of work like companies are going to just keep paying seniors for their now obsolete skills.

Where do you think your moat is if you insist on sticking at a level of abstraction where the AI keeps eating into your job, instead of stepping up and handling architecture, systems design, etc. at a higher level?

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

#494

Post by vidarh »

jedwards1211 wrote: post #421
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.

Some of the biggest improvements I've made in the clarity and typesafety of the code I write came from seeing the weak points while slogging through writing code, and choosing or writing better libraries to solve certain problems. If everyone stops writing code I can only imagine quality will stagnate

Everyone won't stop writing code. But not everone needs to code.

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

#495

Post by vidarh »

blibble wrote: post #438
vidarh wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making flawed assumptions you have no basis for. Most of my work is on projects I have a long term vested interest in. I care far more about maximally leveraging LLMs for the projects I have a vested interest in - if my clients don't want to, that's their business. Most of my LLM usage directly affects my personal finances in terms of the ROI my non-consulting projects generate - I have far more incentives to…

it appears as if I touched a nerve there I'm making no assumptions it is my observation of the contractor/employee relationship over my 20 year career, from tiny startups to megacorps (and having been on both sides of the fence)

So you just threw out an observation that has no relevance to what I wrote or my situation, and it implied no assumptions. Sure.

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

#496

Post by vidarh »

slekker wrote: post #409
vidarh wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point is we increasingly don't need to be authors. Most of us aren't paid to be authors in your analogy. (Which is good, because outside of your analogy, most authors are paid peanuts, and most of those of us who do write do so because we enjoy it, not as a job) But even if our jobs were to be authors, while I learned some things about writing books from writing the novels I have written and published, I l…

I recommend you to read https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

I share his confusion over Gas Town and Beads, and neither have much relevance to what I'm doing.

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

#497

Post by thisguystinks »

jama211 wrote: post #388

Considering HN’s fear and hate of coding ai, this will launch to the top despite being a small study that makes a lot of overzealous conclusions.

You’re mistaken about the sentiment here. The most popular people are huge AI glazers.

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

#498

Post by archy_ »

alexjplant wrote: post #369
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…

When I used Copilot autocomplete more I noticed myself slipping a bit when it comes to framework and syntax particulars so I instituted a moratorium on it on Fridays to prevent this. Claude Code seems to be a much better paradigm. For novel implementations I write code manually while asking it questions. For things that I'm prototyping I babysit it closely and constantly catch it doing things that I don't want it to…

4b-model take. LLMs are far more intelligent than you give them credit for. Every new layer of abstraction allows us to develop software better and faster. People constantly ragged on OOP yet it is the foundation of modern computing. People while about "bloat" but continue to buy more RAM. Compilers are a black box and meaningfully inhibit your ability to write asm but these days nobody cares. I see LLMs as the next logical evolution in computing abstractions.

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

#499

Post by thisguystinks »

pranavj wrote: post #372

Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think. We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has a…

The real question is whether one should live at all in a world devoid of meaning, where the only source of meaning available to is have a fake job with a better title than the next guy and a big number in the fake account.

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

#500

Post by kaydub »

baddash wrote: post #410
kaydub wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'd say I'm thinking and doing way more. One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year" I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The…

I've had the same type of experience where I feel like the knowledge barrier for a lot of projects has been made much smaller than it used to be :D btw, I have a couple of questions just out of curiosity: What tools do you use besides Claude? Do you have a local or preferred setup? and do you know of any communities where discussion about LLM/general AI tool use is the focus, amongst programmers/ML engineers? Been tr…

Claude is my favorite and at work it's what we officially use. At home I pay for claude by the token but I have a gemini and chatgpt account. So at home I use a lot more gemini cli and codex.

For my setup, I make sure I have good markdown files and I use beads. I'll usually have an AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md in every project and 99.9% of the time they're the exact same. I always make sure to keep these files up to date. If the LLM does something I don't like and I can foresee it being a problem, I'll add it to the markdown file as something not to do.

My markdown files generally have multiple sections. There's always a good chunk describing the app (or in a non software case, the goal or purpose). Some design/architecture decisions will make it into the markdown files. How to build/test are in the markdown files.

I think it helps that I already have good patterns and structure to most things I build. I have moved more to a monorepo since LLMs came out. So an android app won't be in a separate repo as the webapp, instead they're all in the same repo with different directories (frontend vs {app}-android/{app}-iphone/{app}-mobile). Everything I build gets deployed to AWS and I have good patterns for that. Make for builds/deploys/tests, I don't ever run terraform or npm or maven or any other builds on the cli, if I'm running it it goes in the Makefile. All apps follow the same Makefile patterns where certain commands all get rolled up into the same one (make plan, make build, make deploy) using the same general env vars.

Now for tools and such, I feel like just the cli agents themselves are it. On personal stuff that's 100% all I use, the cli agent. At work I integrate with some MCPs and I've created and use some skills/plugins, but tbh I don't feel like they make a big difference or are necessary. I think the non-deterministic nature of the tool makes these unnecessary. Like sometimes I have to explicitly tell the agent to use the MCP. Sometimes the MCP takes up more context than having the llm create a script to hit and API and recreate the MCP's functionality.

And when I have questions, like you did here, I ask the llms first. I ask a lot of "meta" questions to the llm in my sessions even. I like to think it primes it for going down the path you want.

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