Discussion
There's yet another study about how bad AI is for our brains
bayarearefugee: Great news for the AI providers, turns out they are automatically turning their audience into captives who end up increasingly dependent on their product to get anything done.
voidUpdate: "Hey kid, wanna try an LLM? First session is free"
desecratedbody: This is why everyone needs to implement "Rawdog Thursdays" as I call it, in which you write code without the assistance of AI (i.e., you are "rawdogging" your professional output).
aqme28: Working with AI just feels like having a team of junior employees.Is this the same effect that causes managers and people in power to sometimes become... (for lack of a better phrase) stupid and crazy?
rcore: I honestly detest the junior employee analogy, AI is not and will never be like working with actual humans.
floren: Agreed, and I feel like it was pretty rare to distinguish junior devs before LLMs, we just used to talk about devs and senior devs. Then we needed a way to make sure it's understood that WE understand how dumb an LLM can be, so "junior" smashed its way into the discourse.If anything, it's more like an over enthusiastic intern who'll go way down a rabbithole of self-doubt and overengineering when you're away at a conference for 3 days.
tokai: And the amount of people that can recite Homer by heart has collapsed since writing came along.
boplicity: > "People’s persistence drops."Has anyone else noticed this, as they've scaled up their AI coding use? I've found it harder to stay on task, and it's affected a broad range of my personal activities. I'm able to make incredible things happen with AI tools, but do worry about the personal costs.
bluGill: I think I'm more able to stay on task - when there is something hard I don't want to do I just tell the AI to figure it out. Previously I would find any excuse to procrastinate. For that matter while the AI is "thinking" I can read a book (unrelated fiction), but I'm still on task because the work is getting done.
kerblang: How about "Working with AI just feels like having a team of junior employees who are completely unscrupulous, sychophantic and sometimes profoundly stupid psychopathic liars"?
avgDev: It doesn't. Juniors are generally SLOW because they are soaking up information and constantly learning. However, this allowed them to learn how to work through difficult problems, and how to communicate if they can't achieve their goals.I think LLMs are a big problem for development of junior devs.(pun intended)
zeroonetwothree: I do it for around 20% of my PRs. However my employer is complaining that my numbers are below their 100% target. So I am being penalised for trying to keep my skills up.
440bx: Your employer is a fucking moron.
esafak: Businesses can remain irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
zeroonetwothree: Tell me something I don’t know
rbtms: This might actually be a point for the need of sophisticated local AI.
gjsman-1000: All fun and games until the first time someone successfully sues an employer who mandated it and wins a mental health claim.The moment that happens, insurance flips tables, OSHA starts asking if they need exposure controls, and employers back down.And that’s the good scenario! The bad scenario is an employer mandated it, and someone mentally declined to the point they committed a public act of violence.
BoneShard: and the last piece of the remaining work moves to a place with less strict mandates.
fragmede: I sent the study to ChatGPT for analysis and it told me not to worry about it so I'm not gonna.
fumar: It feels like every other convenience in modern life. We trade off some value for lack of human ability. Should you drive or walk or bike? In the US, most people drive and sit all day. Now we have fenced off part of our week for dedicated physical exercise to counteract physical atrophy.
pizza234: I agree in principle, although I personally consider mental atrophy to be far more serious than physical atrophy (and I value physical fitness very high already!).
fragmede: That you can be utterly awful to and they won't quit or feel sick. They'll never show up to work hung over or have a relative that needs surgery so they need an advance in pay and also they're never emotional because their partner of seven years broke up with them and their dog and cat and pet rabbit died. They'll never go to HR because you sexually harassed them, they'll work on your schedule and are available, in your house in your bed, at 4 am when inspiration hits so you pull out your laptop.So what if they lie every once in a while?
KevinMS: I can't wait to be one of the last thinking humans.
OnionBlender: How are they measuring it? My boss gave me a hard time because I wasn't using enough of my token budget. How do they know what percentage of your pull request was AI written?
keysersoze33: Link to the preprint paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721Worth reading the conclusion - makes a good point or two regarding the cumulative effect of using AI and not only the loss of the learning through struggle/time, but also the reference point of how long tasks should take without AI (e.g. we are no willing longer afford the time to learn the hard way, which will impact the younger generation notably).
abnercoimbre: > we are no willing longer afford the time to learn the hard wayDo we have well-informed suggestions as to why?
karmakurtisaani: I'm guessing because the hard way is the hard way?
m_w_: Obviously the discussion here is mostly about writing code. In that domain, I’m always of two minds on this sort of thing. Although I think everyone would agree that material cognitive decline is bad, I also think we have to be precise with what that means.During university, for an exam in a graduate databases course, I had to manually calculate the number of operations for a query, down to the ones place. We were given an E-R diagram, the schema, and the query. So we had to act as the query planner - build out the B+ tree, check what was most efficient, and do it.This is by all means a pointless endeavor - no one has had to do this by hand in literally decades. It was also among the hardest cognitive tasks I've ever had to do. After being one of two people to complete the exam in the three allotted hours, I sat outside the lecture hall on a bench for a little while because I though I might faint if I went any further.I’m beginning to feel the same about writing code by hand. If I can design systems that are useful, performant, and largely maintainable, but the code is written by an LLM, is this harmful? It feels that I spend more time thinking about what problems need to be solved and how best to solve them, instead of writing idiomatic typescript. It’d be hard to convince me that’s a bad thing.
goalieca: And now the number of people who car read Homer and study it are dropping to 0. They just want the summary notes without any deep thought and the reward that comes with it.
red-iron-pine: someone out there, probably a professor of classics, can pay for a house with Homer.I never will. I'll take the summary notes.
ethanrutherford: Basing what you consider important to know solely on "what can make me money" is a very self-sabotage way to live life.
raxxorraxor: > Should you drive or walk or bike?Funny you should mention that. There was a HN post about the prompt similar to this: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 100m away. Should I drive or walk?" - Was quite difficult for even frontier models. Surely they now do better, but it was quite entertaining reading the answers.
