I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without an LLM present doing 90% of the work. Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own, which is a required skill for producing original thought. For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exams, and overall output volume will still be fine due to LLM help. But I do believe it's already happening absolutely everywhere around us. Honestly, I wanted to be in denial about it before but it's too obvious to ignore now.

Rest doesn't make sense either with the parent's tautologies and self-counters. They seem to argue for it and raise the challenges. ~"Speed doesn't matter unless you need it." ~"LLMs can be good, but if you don't use them properly™, then they become a crutch." It's hard to deny that "cognitive offloading" via LLMs is becoming a more acute problem [0]. The intelligentsia were supposed to be immune. [0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-ai-chatbots-coul...

It's two fold. They're learning and understanding more things, but at a very surface level and without the nuance and ability to actually use the knowledge because they have none of the muscle memory and hard work associated with learning it. You can use AI or the internet to learn the basics of how a gas engine works in a couple of minutes. But you'd be incapable of actually working on a gas engine or designing one. Surface level knowledge gets you surface level functionality. You don't become good at something from surface level knowledge, but you might think you're good at it.

Yeah, I'm 45 and I'm like you - no social media, relatively under connected, and still feel swamped constantly by emails and calls and especially texts. They eat up half my productive time every day, and most of them are things I'm looped in on that I don't even need to respond to. Okay so let's say that's the new cognitive burden. The new escape hatch is "AI". Now you don't need to read your mail or write responses! Let an LLM handle that for you! And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway, so if you're actually taking the time to read and respond to it yourself you're a chump, right? Noise machines. Humans are noise machines. Ever try to sleep till noon and notice that everyone else seems like they can't feel alive unless they wake up and make the maximum amount of noise and racket possible? What could be better for a gibbering species of ground dwelling apes than a miraculous machine that gibbers for them, to point back and forth at each other?

I'm noticing some decline of skills I don't practice regularly and LLM is just one of reasons why one stops practicing. Switching to another area of work gives a comparable decline. If you want sharp skills you have to use them.

True. People don't do it though, because keeping skills sharp and using them takes effort, and we have a predisposition to be as efficient as possible with how we spend our effort; if there's an easier way to do it in our awareness, we will naturally gravitate towards that. LLMs are often a universal crutch or swiss-army-knife that significantly take away workload for many abstract tasks, so all kinds of atrophy in abstract thinking is to be expected. However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it. I wonder if the same is true for skills; in that case, some kind of regiment where you still use the skill you delegate once a week or so could maybe help with avoiding this loss of skill for most part.

I'm dumb as a rock and I don't have a PhD, but since ~1 year ago I started forcing myself to do small bits of coding and math manually. I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

> I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se The funny thing is, maybe not noticing one can be the actual sign of it :)

Yes, precisely. Assessing your own cognitive skills is dubious. I’m pretty certain I’m less clever than I was when younger but if I find a problem tough now maybe 25 yo me would also have struggled?

That’s the most important thing. If we keep reading, maybe we can hold our own.

Absolutely this, I'm the same as you. And I'm just afraid this is what cognitive decline feels like from inside the deteriorating mind.

>even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy. The same weight feeling heavier is a sign that your muscles are weaker :) There's many areas in life were we look back a few decades and think "people use to do it that awkwardly?" And yet results were better. I think the process of removing friction have just served to destroy our ability to concentrate and tolerate difficulty.

“ I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier"” These are correlated - it just hasn’t happened in a large enough amount for you to have clearly noticed it yet.

I don’t buy it. Properly leveraging LLMs to generate stable and extendable systems is mentally exhausting (i.e. highly demanding of intelligent thought), especially given the poor quality and churn within the harness ecosystem. Now, if you’re creating trivial, unstable, or nonextendable systems maybe this doesn’t apply. And maybe I have long overestimated the work that SWEs have done.

i use claude a lot and i find that it is best applied in domains in which i am already a master. I tried applying it to domain's im unfamiliar with and i found that i produced stuff but as time went on i understood what i produced less and i almost felt like i do after binge watching a netflix show, 2 weeks later i barely remember any of the details. I wonder how much you need to "do" to learn and remember. LLM's give you a shortcut to doing and so you probably aren't learning either. It's like when you watch a professor write a proof and it makes sense while listening to the professor but at home you have difficulty deriving it. LLM's give me the same sort of feeling. I think the way forward is still going to be doing things manually to learn and using LLM's once you've mastered an area and people who don't understand this fact are going to slowly descend down a hill and forget how to depend on their own thinking.

LLMs have killed my facility but not my knowledge. I can still read code and write it, I just need to look back at docs a lot more, when I used to just know things. I also have to sit and try to recall how to do things and what abstractions are involved more. I also have more "writer's block" when starting with a fresh program/document if trying not to get AI to seed it with a baseline implementation, where I have to sit for a while thinking about what I really want to build.

My son just finished his first year in college, and had no trouble getting decent grades without using AI while many of the kids around him were using it. At least in his humanities track, class participation is a lot of his grade, and he said the "AI kids" tended to suck at participation because they hadn't actually thought about the material, and couldn't dynamically work with it in class. He also said their AI assisted writing that he'd read was dull and unoriginal, and all sounded the same, which he thought likely helped his essays stand out. His English composition teacher said he was "probably too advanced for this class" when he told her he didn't use AI to write his essays, which made him roll his eyes, as he has clinically diagnosed dysgraphia (learning disability in writing).

> But I still write my code myself. Not for long, if you so easily have caved in to using AI elsewhere. People are lazy. If you see that the 'results are nice', it's game over for your programming/thinking. Waiting for the day the advice will be to "enjoy AI assistance in moderation"

At this rate humans will become avatars remotely controlled by LLMs. Ironic conclusion of the consciousness debate.

The other day I just wanted to loop through characters in a std::string to copy data to a new string with a few escape characters (sending to peripheral device). Simple enough task for AI. I got a coroutine monstrocity back, with copies to std::array and a range based iterator, since I specified C++23. If I specified C++11, I would have received a: char p = src.data(); while ( p) { … p++; } I had the experience to keep calling out AI to simplify and downgrade the solution to something primitive, which ended up smaller, faster, easier to maintain. Juniors with real world experience would not bother, they’ll take the first working AI result.

As much as I hate to admit it, using agents for too long makes me less able to think for myself. I am dedicating 30 mins to 1 hour everyday writing and thinking without LLMs.

> I am dedicating 30 mins to 1 hour everyday writing and thinking without LLMs. Before you did this, was literally every hour of your waking time spend thinking about LLMs? I don't think I could do that even if I tried, and I spend all my development hours with agents, but during meals, showers, walking the dogs, enjoying a coffee outside or whatever, naturally I get time to think about other stuff, sounds out of the ordinary (to me at least) to have to dedicate 1 hour to not think about something. Reminds me of when I was addicted to amphetamines way back when.

I have observed this in myself when I began to over-leverage AI in my workflows. I've since become more deliberate with what kinds of tasks I will use it for, although I still slip up. 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.

Depends on the person. I find that it's extremely satisfying to figure out a tricky problem on the way to that end result - to struggle with something for a bit, then finally fix it or fully wrap my head around it. So to me, it's a mixture of both. What I want is the end result, but in the past sometimes that came with thinking in the shower about an approach... Or a wild thought while going to bed that makes me jump up and grab my computer. That doesn't happen for me anymore to the same degree.

I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through. The way we are using electronic devices today, in some years it will probably be looked at like smoking cigarettes. And I'd argue that a lot of the "decline" is due to a shift of skills away from things that mattered more in the past toward other things that are not measured/perceived by the older generation.

Thinking is the skill that becomes obsolete.

Or when the Internet came and made memory kinda obsolete. Why remember facts if you can simply index them and then lookup on demand. But now we delegate thinking itself, so I wonder what is left.

Funny that you mention that. A month ago I started the Duolingo chess course, and just yesterday I noticed that my brain is clearer, more capable of deep thought than it has been in years. It's like stepping out of a fog. I also started CPAP recently, so it's hard to attribute the change to either, but I feel certain that the chess helped.

The interesting thing about jogging is I do my best thinking while jogging. I've found it impossible to do deep thinking while driving, as driving evidently requires higher functions of the brain. Jogging doesn't require any of that, I can jog deep in thought and have no recollection of the previous mile.

You do realise most people aren’t in shape right? The idea that most people have the discipline to keep themselves mentally in check is false. We already know this! Millions and billions of people who spend hrs a day consuming media on platforms such as instagram.

The human is designed to interact with small groups, to understand several smaller groups, and perhaps to imagine a big group of smaller groups. In a literal sense, let's say 100 people per group. At that level the human can actually know and interact with them still. In a city of 100.000 it's still managable to feel you are related and involved to this group-of-groups. In a city of a million, you'll revert to only your own small group and have lost the connection to the collective. The same goes for speed and quantity of input, as to what the human is designed for (not literally designed). Be it social media with it's infinite scrolling, cars racing by as opposed to looking out the window a few times per hour because you see someone/something, constant sound input if you live anywhere remotely busy or work in a busy office. The point I'm trying to make is that the world used to be comprehensible for the human. Some understood a little complexer things, some only the simpler things. Now there is an overload of everything. So, most humans are in survival mode wether they know it or not. Hence the many seekin mindfullness etc No matter, it's an observation, not a judgement or opinion on it. The world will just keep rushing forward. Some have a slight hand in the direction it goes for better (never) or for worse, but spiral it will.

Do any of said PhDs gain anything positive from LLM usage? Or does it only lead to declining thinking skills in your view?

Yes, I can churn out a lot more stuff as can most of my peers. Experiments etc are all way faster to run with coding agents. But I think the overall creativity and originality is a lot lower. I think this is what many people are facing, if you don't use LLMs your short term productivity is worse.

It’s creating a daemon and machine spirit filled world of Warhammer 40k. We already scarcely understand how the world works, but LLM use actively degrades cognitive ability that way it is used by a majority of people (The bringing a forklift to gym analogy).

You cannot tell me that letting anyone do something for you does not affect the skills that you outsourced, unless you are some sort of a superhuman. As an example, I have been drawing portraits for quite a few years now, and whenever I go on a hiatus and come back after a few months, I can notice my skill not being anywhere close to where it was before I stopped using it. Sure, after 2 or 3 portraits they mostly come back because of the previous experience, but skill rust is a real thing, and if you think your coding skills are the same because you used to code 20 years but haven't coded for some time, you are probably just lying to yourself.

Yeah he’s living in denial. His skills are slowly eroding. Given that he spent 20 yrs building it up it won’t happen overnight. But the trade off is happening in real time.

Yeah, it's a scary thought. I feel the pull of it every time I'm stuck on a code problem that I don't want to search solutions for and hand-code... and I also feel myself wanting to reach for the crutch of an LLM when I just have something boilerplate and easy to do. It's incredibly tempting to just ask the question and have the "thinking" done for you. Until you have actual skin in the game and realize that it doesn't reason, and its "thinking" is utter shit. Then it's like: you got addicted to cigarettes and now you have to quit, because this habit is poisonous. It really does lead very quickly to cognitive decline if you rely on them, or even think about asking them while you're writing code.

> For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exam I think this is true of every affliction that adults criticize children and teenagers of I’ve been out of university for a very long time, and I took a community college course and for the first few sessions I couldn't focus or sit still at all. Fortunately I knew that was abnormal and how to conform to a prior version of myself, but I don’t think children have a frame of reference.

I see this too. There is this theme where people are more and more going only as far as the ai does. Asking suggesting or arguing to go deeper is impossible. There is a new path of least resistance and it saddens me.

>Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; tomorrow most regular people's thinking skills will definitely be weaker than those of the LLMs of tomorrow. And physical skills in most cases will be weaker than those of the robots. That leads to the question - what would most people do?

> Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own Sorry, but I highly doubt that. Has a very "old man yells at clouds" vibe.

I doubt it. I'm stupid and I use LLMs a lot but I can still meditate for 30 minutes. But apparently some of the smartest people in the world have lost the skill? But the commenter haven't, because why, they're 15 years older and thus immune to the same LLM-effects? Plus, the issue with people having trouble sitting still for 30 minutes precede LLMs with decades.

I didn't say I'm immune to those effects, I'm including myself in this as well. (also, I'm not older than my colleagues). Most people definitely can't meditate for 30 minutes, so if you can do this, it's very impressive. Regardless, being able to think about poorly-defined problems and build completely new mental models from nothing is genuinely a really hard and uncomfortable task. If you don't use the skill you'll lose it.

> Most people definitely can't meditate for 30 minutes, so if you can do this, it's very impressive. 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.

> I'm stupid and I use LLMs a lot but I can still meditate for 30 minutes. > apparently some of the smartest people in the world have lost the skill? > But the commenter haven't > why? Perhaps because a correlation you assumed was there (more smartness = more ability to sit still alone with one's thoughts), is not actually as strong as you thought? If one does not start with that assumption, there is no inherent conflict in the 3 pieces of evidence you cited. Or perhaps because you are smarter than you give yourself credit for :)

The jump is very likely due to AI usage and lack of skills in mathematics. It seems like prerequisite classes are not being fulfilled. "Ranade said students are expected to enter the course having taken classes on linear algebra, vector calculus and mathematical proofs. However, she found out in office hours that many students struggled with linear algebra, and was even more shocked when one student told her the linear algebra class they took at UC Berkeley had an “open-internet, open-AI policy” for homework and exams."

Testing was the annoying flood barrier. AI is the rainstorm that shows why it was necessary.

It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point. That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.

The obvious cognitive deterimental effects of using map apps, when we all realized we lose directional sense and our previous ability to navigate without the smartdevices, was society's canary in a coal mine and a headsup of what was coming. WAL-E and Idiocracy. The future.

> I'd rather use that brain power for other problems. Except you won't have the underpinnings to even properly think about other problems. Your brain will be mush. > I don't want to have to store a bunch of location or routing data in my head. This is preposterous.

You are confusing faculty with records. The ability to navigate by sense of direction. The ability to memorize numbers. The ability to think clearly by yourself. Watcha gonna do if big tech takes away your access to the outsourced brain, dear?

Think about what you just said. Oh wait, you can't.

You are wrong. Some would have failed before, but not in the larger numbers. Before when they couldn’t complete an assignment they would try different things, seek a professor, or seek out friends to help explain. You could find answer keys to many assignments online, but that doesn’t feel like learning and wouldn’t even always answer your actual misunderstanding. It wasn’t perfectly tailored to your issue all the time. Now the barrier to an answer is zero. They are basically watching a YouTube video on how to X, seeing step by step instructions feeling like they are doing it, and the moment they swing a real hammer they are whacking themselves in the crotch. It might get better after a few years, but this stuff is just now hitting mainstream for the masses. ChatGPT has only been in mainstream use for about 3 years.

Even as a software engineer myself, I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me The solution? I'm not sure but possibly use AI as more of a collaborate partner to discuss with rather than letting it give you the answers

> I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me > The solution? I'm not sure This initially felt like you were setting up a joke. If you feel like something is harmful to you, stop doing it. Find alternatives (they are there, it’s everything else; commercial LLMs are still fairly recent). Thinking “maybe I don’t have to let it go, I can still use it if I do it this other way” sounds like an addict justifying themselves. I say all this without a hint of judgment. I genuinely hope you are able to tackle the harm you’re feeling.

This tracks, I have read that this generation is the first one since the 1800s that performs worse academically than the previous ones. Experts blamed screens and anything digital in the classroom.

It's not just 'a person' or 'a student', we as a collective become more dumb. Very simple example to highlight this: Most developers use(d?) stackoverflow. Everything related to software development is stored there. The LLM's trained on it. Now a huge set of developers now longer go to stackoverflow to get answers. Or add to the collective. Stackoverflow is losing money (ad revenue). If / when stackoverflow goes away we will lose a huge amount of collective information on software development. We, as a group, will take a huge step back.

All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs is atrophying their skills in real-time. I have yet to meet a single person for whom it's not the case. But I essentially completely stopped using them for software engineering (why isn't really relevant, but it's not because od this skill atrophy). So as the skills of everyone else is diminishing, mine is proportionally raising. It has never been easier to get better than others. You don't need to put in more effort, just the same effort as you always have, and others will do the job of losing their skills for your own benefit.

> According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F’s did not exceed 10% for either class. I don't think instruction would've changed drastically in the last year though.

It’s only going to get worse. The second things like Claude Cowork get opened up to non-technical teams you start to see the influx of emails and Slack message written with LLM’s for absolutely no productivity gain (in fact probably a loss given how unnecessarily wordy the messages are). Too many people want to give up any and all responsibility.

Some people need Jesus, but y'all need Kant ;) "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance." https://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html

why would I as a child ever develop the imagination needed to actively engage with AI tools in the manner you describe? those AI tools take care of the imagining for me.

Spring 2026 saw a marked shift in student performance. We saw it in intro physics courses on the East coast too. I bet anyone who cared to look saw it.

Yep, I'm starting to hear this more and more. Matches my local data. It's a very massive and visible shift in DFW rates.

We're going to find that LLM usage has even worse effects on the mind than the horrific effects we're just starting to be certain of from social media. I'm just not going to use either. See you lads on the other side.