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.

> but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy. Not getting that quick dopamine hit the LLMs give you.. Some say you can re-train your system to get back the dopamine hits you used to get from other things, like the enjoyment of the "old fashioned" manual coding and math. Getting there is hard work. And YMMV.

LLMS didn’t invent cheating just made it easier. When you cheat you’re the one who cheats yourself because the point of an education is to learn, not complete the assignments and get high marks on tests alone. No one benefits and no one other than you is materially hurt by cheating, but you are absolutely the one who is hurt. There’s no way to learn than to force the brain into adaptation which it is resistant to do through challenge and stress, just like your muscles. Similarly you can’t play e sports and get into physical condition any more than you can use LLMs to do your homework and learn. It’s going to be a hard adjustment for a lot of people to recognize that letting the machine think for you is as healthy as smoking brain cigarettes. The smart student uses the LLM as a proctor or provide challenges and feedback on attempts rather than an easy button. They make great tools for learning if they’re used as an adversarial or editorial tool. The future belongs to those who work to use the tools in ways that make themselves more efficacious, not those who use efficacious tools so they don’t have to work.

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.

Shouldn't it be the opposite? 1h max LLM per day?

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.

Interesting analogy. I believe regarding addictiveness they may be compared. > 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. Do you have any ideas what these things might be? As someone in his twenties, I’m sometimes saddened by observing that some of the skills I acquired over a long time (e.g., writing, coding) may become obsolete or won’t be respected anymore just now that I‘m finally getting good at them.

> I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through. I used to think like this until social media proved there are some tech innovations we just can’t adjust to. 10 years ago you would’ve never caught me supporting any sort of age based social media ban. Now? I don’t think it goes far enough. Fake news ( actual fake news) and misinformation has only gotten worse with it as well. It’s so destructive.

I think there’s a major part of this conversation being omitted, though I am not saying you did it intentionally: “the attention economy.” We have gone from advertising to a system of creating addicts for profit

Definately agree, that was included in the "or for worse" in this sentence I wrote. As for creating the addicts, nobody had a masterplan. It's all the pieces spiraling together, >> 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. The systems are too large and self-propulsing for anyone to really control. Consider the rainforest. How many millions of variables interact, nobody is in charge, everything influences everything in a billion different ways. You might say, well we can cut it down, so kind we can control it. Allright, let's continue to spiral. You might build a city there after a few years. Still in charge right. But it get's too hot because there's no vegitation, so you have to change again. And then we find that people keep getting strangely sick, and scientists find some special mushroom that survived and apparantly thrives on the mix of cut trees and diesel fumes and their spores in the air are poisonous. I made that up, but you get the idea hopefully.

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.

Why is it so hard to believe? The young adults now have grown up with short form media and instant gratification / dopamine hits from apps. It's vastly different than people of the same age just a few years ago. Not saying everyone else is immune, but those a few years older have also had a period without it.

That's a judgemental approach to a pattern that has all the marks of addicting behavior. Of course many people in a competitive environment will click the autosolve button if available. This is a reason to think how to redesign the system so that the approach we want is the reasonable choice, not to look with superiority at those who fall prey to the danger.

> 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.

Social media wasn't always toxic at least not to the degree it is today. LLMs could be potentially a lot worse given the right set of instructions

Tell that to millions of ex-smokers.