Tell HN: Man, AI is killing my brain (news.ycombinator.com)
But I saw that my colleagues were shipping more, and so I started to ease on my reviews. At first, I would push small features straight to main. But my colleagues were shipping 10x more than me, and I need my job, so I started to push more and rely more on AI. As the agent was doing its work, sometimes 20-30 minutes, I would mindlessly scroll social media, something I tried to avoid for a very long time. But then I saw that my peers are using work trees, running multiple agents. So I started to do the same. Now, instead of mindlessly scrolling, I was launching 4-5 agents, juggling between their output. At some point, I was no longer having mental capacity to understand so much context, so I just started to chose the "Recommended" suggestion by Claude. I no longer know the code, or how things work. If there is a bug, I just copy the user complaint / bug description into Claude and let it figure it out. The good/bad part is that it seems to work. And I'm afraid what's next.
Almost one year later and I'm no longer sure I can write code any more. Hell, I'm even struggling to write this post because AI is very good at understanding wrongly spelled words, doesn't care about punctuation or capital letters. Every single thing that made me think, was taken away from me. I no longer have brain ability to research for stuff, I just let AI do it.
"Well, just do it yourself", "write code by hand" - I heard you scream from your chairs. I wish I could, but after 10 hours and 15 parallel agents, I no longer have the brain capacity to do anything. "Then change your job" you object, and I hear you, but every interviewer I talk to either asks me "please tell me how you use AI in day to day work" or simply states "we like to move fast, so we use AI as much as possible". I feel like a mindless blob, floating around, paying mortgage, trying to survive, while my brain is being destroyed. I never did drugs, but I think this is how it might feel.
No question. Not asking for advice. Just sharing my misery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424762
AI atrophies the brain. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies.
You know the solution.
I wrote about this on my blog - How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Making Us Dumber
https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...
if you actually do use AI to do some proper research on a fields you don't really know that well, looking for peer reviewed papers, actually figuring more things out thanks to AI, then I don't think brain damage will happen.
about your blog post: You jump from a quote about llms hallucinating articles references in students papers, to the statement "if AI does the thinking for you". since when is inventing falsehoods thinking?
If you're using AI to learn a new field (by which I assume you mean asking it what literature to read, asking questions when you don't understand something, etc.), you are accepting short-term speed in exchange for the long-term growth of research skills. Maybe that trade-off is worth it, if you don't need to master a topic long-term.
If you do need to master a topic, the slow and painful bits are the useful bits. Spending two hours hunting for an answer to something you don't understand increases your familiarity with the available resources, broadens your knowledge base, leads you to thinking of more questions about the subject and to understand your original question more deeply.
Shortcutting all of that with a quick answer from an LLM is not helpful long-term.
The brain damage comes from trusting something other than your own brain to tell you what you understand, believe or know. You wind up thinking you hold positions you can't articulate, have skills you can't actually demonstrate, understand things you can't explain, and it's all downhill from there.
I know you didn't ask for advice, but I've found that sitting down with a physical book helps. Also listening to music with your eyes closed, walking with no headphones, and working with your hands.
If you're a junior engineer or an intern doing this, I think it might be harmful long-term.
It's the lack of motivation. Why even bother doing something by hand when an LLM can get me 90% of what I want in a few minutes, without much work from me? What value can I provide to this project that Claude cannot?
But even in the age of 3D-Printers and such, people still wood-work and metal-smith and make models. We have Suno but (most) artists are still writing music by hand, out of passion of the craft.
I'd suggest just trying to find something you're passionate about, and work on that. Maybe it's not even programming-related.
Or I'm way off-base, just trying to draw parallels to myself. Feel free to dismiss this
https://croissanthology.com/earring
Everything I make is now a glorious speedrun.
As someone that is actually resisting the madness, I come to these threads with a feeling of "I told you so" and pretty soon it turns into sadness for my fellow engineers, my fellow humans.
I'm sorry you are going through this, likely there is no good answer because we're at the forefront of this nascent revolution, and empathy is hard to come by; I have tried to have serious discussions about the psychological impacts of AI and they get overwhelmed by maximalists and the sociopaths that are unable to see the ramifications of this thing and just care about how many commits they have pushed today. Get ready for the canned response of "I'm having fun!" to someone that is apparently dealing with psychological pain.
Here's the only important thing that you will likely ignore because a paycheck is a paycheck: your health is your most important resource. If a thing is dangerous to your physiology, stop doing that, and rearrange your life around this new insight. Literally nothing else should matter above your health.
You're not the first to voice these concerns, but they are still not taken seriously and it's terrifying how willing we are to hide our heads in the sand.
We are in a situation where execs are requiring us to do actions that reduce our market value, maybe permanently. It is in your best interest to resist as hard as you possibly can, to the point of insubordination. It's as dire as if your employer required you to take mind altering drugs daily. You cannot accept this if you want to remain employable for the long term.
With an 10x amount of output you 10x the amount of failures at constant production quality. Did you put improved processes into place?
Nah mate, drugs actually feel good.