> If, on the other hand, LLMs help you with making much faster progress in understanding the subject that you study My experience is that they uncomfortably do both. You can "understand" something conceptually quicker -- like you have a new brain-muscle-thing that lets you cut through the hard difficult tedious corners to get to the meat of the matter. But then you also can become reliant on it, and have difficulty doing the mechanistic rote work of working through it yourself. Like the really big powerful calculator that it is, really.

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.

How do they keep up? Honestly it’s too risky to make a serious move on such a fast-paced environment. The only thing I can see them doing is removing technology altogether. People did just fine 100 years ago. Want to learn to code? Use a Commodore 64. The company was purchased and rebooted the C64: https://commodore.net/

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket. It’s a familiar feeling of when some question comes up and I think “oh, I used to know that, let me look it up”. Maybe I just already hit my personal floor of stupidity before LLMs. However, I personally feel a huge mental burden of the state of communication. The contemporary version of it where I have a million threads and conversations im juggling at any given time. Emails, voicemail, chat, online, texts, personal, business, home, children, other family, friends, then there’s the variants like Messages, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. And as overwhelming as it is for me, I’m super under connected than everyone else I know. I quit following most news and all sports, as I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. My brain was molded preinternet and I feel like it’s reaching its max on the analog to digital conversion. Or at least it’s just a really lossy process.

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.

“ However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it” No.. this depends on how much muscle you have. The appropriate comparison is mass and density of knowledge/understanding vs muscle. There’s not a chance in hell you will retain mass and dense muscle without pushing the body hard. Just in the same way you will not retain very deep understanding of things unless a) you’ve been reciting it for over 10 yrs b) you go back and push the understanding continuously for it to remain as part of your being

Building muscle is much harder than maintaining muscle. And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before. It's pretty comparable to skills. You don't need to practice as hard to maintain a skill than you do to build it. And if you let the skill atrophy, it's much easier to recover the skill compared to building it from scratch.

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

>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.

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.

> 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"

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 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.

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.

Thinking is the skill that becomes obsolete.

Nah. What you said there is just an extension of the elimination of friction that the silicon valley has been pursuing for the last 15+ years. But that is just.. well. Their business model. Not a force of nature.

Eh, I think it's less like a cigarette and more like the car. We're not going back. Americans are famously less healthy the more car dependent they are, and now people walk/run as an explicit task to be healthy. People will start going to a "thinking" gym, or engaging in additional manual mental activities for sport, like we do with chess today.

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.

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.

I recently switched back from a Tesla to an older car without permanently having a map visible. Suddenly my brain has to think about routes again and it definitively feels like my brain has to put in more effort again to handle it.

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.

>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?

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.

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.

This goes with calculator to do basic math, contacts apps to store phone numbers instead of remembering them, and watches to tell time imo. Sure we could use our brain power with old techniques to do these, but why? I don't want to do any of these. I'd rather use that brain power for other problems. Same with maps. I don't want to have to store a bunch of location or routing data in my head. I think what you're pointing towards is going from having problems to solve to not having any problems to solve. That's definitely a danger, but right now is still early in the AI era so obviously it'll feel like we went from solving problems to letting the new tool solve them for us. There are still many problems to solve.

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?

You are not storing these things in your head at the expense of anything else. You’re “training” the existing underutilized capacity in your brain for something useful.

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.

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.