AI has destroyed my brain.
Posted by Complete-Sea6655@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 58 comments
Something absolutely shocking happened to me today.
For the first time in months I was given a software task without having access to any AI or any internet. It was an extremely simple task which I had for the past four years (2 times a year) been comfortabily capable of completing with a few hours of focus.
Today, it took me a few hours to get 20% of the way there.
I didn't realise the amount to which my coding brain had atrophied since I've began using AI coding tools nearly a year ago.
It struck me how useless I have become since depending on AI to do the thinking for me.
So, I am gonna start coding by brain again, not sure if I will completely retire my AI tools (as I will probably fall behind my peers) but I shall start ramping up LOC written by finger instead of LLM.
imnotabot303@reddit
This isn't really the fault of AI but the user. Any tool can do this if you let it. Calculators, spell checkers, the internet. Instead of remembering things or carrying out the task ourselves we just outsource the thinking part. If you do it too often your brain gets out of practice like a muscle you stop using.
TransylvaniaBytes@reddit
I've noticed the atrophy is real but it hits differently depending on the task. for me it's worst on the boring stuff, boilerplate, string manipulation, the things AI hoovers up first.
What actually helped was forcing myself through the first 30 minutes of a new problem without touching it. Like going to the gym, if you only lift when it's easy, don't be surprised when your arms stop working :)
downloads-cars@reddit
MIT recently did a study on long term cognitive debt. I suggest you look into it. I have been a staunch opponent of AI workflow usage in my org, demonstrating the back end effort to correct AI produced documents and code, along with the decline in quality when this exact scenario happens.
repocin@reddit
This one? (arxiv fulltext))
I've only read the abstract so far, but I can't say I'm surprised by their findings. If you don't use your brain, it stops braining right - and you don't want that.
I'm very concerned about the cognitive impact this tech is going to have on society as a whole, especially once it starts creeping into education of future generations. We've already seen a massive reduction in people's attention span caused by social media, so I can't outsourcing what's left of our cognitive functions to a machine is going to do us much good.
downloads-cars@reddit
And I think it's entirely an education problem. It's being marketed as this substitute for creativity, but it cannot create novelty by design. It (an LLM) simply identifies the next likely character based on everything it has read. I remember reading an alarmist headline to the effect of "IS AI ANXIOUS?"
The real alarm there of course being that if AI writing hints at anxiety, it's because its training data is written anxious. But instead of drawing the natural depressing conclusion that humanity has become unsettled, my wife asked me if the robots are becoming sentient. After explaining neural networks to her, she really understands why it's insane that anyone is using these things for anything at all.
I think it's an incredible technology that could be used to query the ghost of entire demographics, but at the end of the day, it's an environmentally destructive, creativity destroying, psychosis inducing monster and I won't touch it.
Ecstatic_Athlete_646@reddit
I've been dragging my feet at using it and I keep getting called a ludite and it drives me insane. I actually love coding by hand and I intend to be the only one who really understands codebases in 5 years
AmettOmega@reddit
I think the AI can do great things. I love using it for writing ultra tedious stuff like unit tests. Everything else? I prefer to do myself. Otherwise I have no real comprehension of what it actually is doing.
Ecstatic_Athlete_646@reddit
Sure but I hear defense against it for even unit tests. I hear it in defense for everything, use it for this not that, no use it for that not this! Everything is wrong everything is right. Not using it feels like the least risk but I'll keep it around for the real tedious stuff that a regex can't solve, like writing regex.
Gotxi@reddit
Brain is a muscle, if you don't exercise it, it degrades. Fortunately, you can quickly recover, but indeed, you need to think first and use AI only to assist you.
For example, you can do your own code, then ask AI to do a peer review of it and look for improvements, then read what they say and see if it makes sense for you or not.
Never let AI do your job, or effectively, AI will take your job.
Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit
The recovery argument is a trap.
If you learn for a week, you have one years worth of learning experience.
If you stop learning and then "recover", you'll only recover it up to what you knew about one year ago. You're still behind by a year basically.
Dzeddy@reddit
That's also not how practice works. There are very few cognitive skills where if you're relearning you won't relearn much quicker than you did the first time
Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit
I'm not sure how relearning something quick has to do with my point.
caboosetp@reddit
You could be more clear on the point. I had to read it twice over to get it.
The point is you lost the year you were not learning by using AI which could have been spent learning new things and upskilling.
1y of learning + 1y of AI dependence + Relearning = 1y of xp.
2y of learning + 0y of AI dependence = 2 years of xp.
Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit
I see, I guess there are more ways to interpret this than I expected.
I'm basically saying:
Start -> learn for one year -> you have one year of learning experience.
Versus
Start -> don't learn for one year -> recover in one week whatever skills you lost during that year -> you have 0 years of experience after one year and one week passed.
Meaning you'd still be behind by basically one year compared to an upskilled version of you, even if you "recover".
davion303@reddit
Plus now u gotta spend time ro recover and having that time at work that doesnt care is a luxury
Disposable_Gonk@reddit
De-Skilling is a very real and very fast threat.
yopla@reddit
True, I have no idea how to crank a car and use a starter anymore, all those electronic starter have atrophied my skills.
The question is whether those skills still have values going forward.
farfromelite@reddit
Use it or lose it, my friend.
Disposable_Gonk@reddit
So, this is the more extreme form of use it or lose it. It is literally telling your brain "you do not need this part of your brain to perform this task, you can perform it without the brain", and by actively doing the thing that would have required your brain, you lose it at an accelerated rate, compared to simply not using the skill. This is because you are getting the dopamine or whatever of a completed task, without using those pathways, so it prunes them faster than through a lack of use.
Akthrawn17@reddit
You are outsourcing your brain, your talents.
Legitimate-Eye-5733@reddit
Same thing happened when I stopped doing mental math because calculators were everywhere lol. Your brain is just out of practice, it'll come back faster than you think once you start grinding without the AI crutch again
Aris_Gale@reddit
Stop using AI, so when the bubble pops you are the one that kept the skills and most of your collegues will go home. AI is really bad for you and everyone. And stop calling it AI, is not intelligence at all, it doesn't think.. is just an autocompleter
Stunning_Owl_9167@reddit
haha, told everyone this would happen. Hilarious. No one wanted to listen
Jabba_the_Putt@reddit
it hasn't destroyed your brain, you just haven't been using those skills.
neurons that fire together wire together.
ctranger@reddit
I fear the same thing, 20 years into the field.
My fears are a bit different: I still believe I can offer tremendous value to the org via experience, judgement, communication, pattern/problem recognition and prioritizing the right things. The further you get into your career, the more these matter.
But I still need to look at the code, invariably, many times during the day. If the first instinct is to prompt, atrophy and loss of familiarity with the codebase is guaranteed.
I have found it helpful to probe the code manually and formulate my own solution in my head, then use claude to validate it, explore edge cases, other paths. And I review each diff with scrutiny. I may not be 1 shotting or 10x’ing as others claim, but In still invite my agency, mastery and critical thinking to the problem. I simply have claude perform the bulk of the labor. The labor I defined, I scoped. It’s wonderful. But I also wonder how I’d fare without the tool altogether. I may give it a shot for a week.
The job at some level has always been more about reading existing code than writing it. Read a few hundred lines, write a dozen. Read a few dozen files, write a new utility file. As long as you’re reading code, and I think, visualizing how you want to modify it, then sending to ai, maybe that’s good enough.
Or maybe we’re all cooked. Or fighting a problem that wont matter a year, or three for now. I do remember software development before google/stack overflow was a thing. It was slower, deliberate. You spent a lot of time thinking, minmaxing approaches in your head. This new agentic layer, it’s a quantum step, probably for the better, but somethings are definitely lost.
We shape our tools, our tools shape us.
zedef122@reddit
Well said
dadvader@reddit
This. We are hear to deliver the solution to business problem. And company doesn't care how you get there as long as you know the domain and what you're doing.
Denial the tools like this will simply slow you down. Company no longer want to hear how fast you can write solution. They want to hear how fast you can guide AI to get there because you already know the solution. We get endless tales here over and over how they no longer interest in hiring senior without skill to guide AI. The focus should be how to spot AI mistake and know how to solve them. That's where the separation between good software engineer apart from the bad one.
IdiocracyToday@reddit
Really? How do you forget shit? After what has realistically only been a year of AI if you’re in the leading edge of usage. I could take a beach vacation and not even look at a computer for a year and not forget anything.
Cliffhanger87@reddit
Some people’s brains just don’t work like that I can forget stuff very fast but atleast I’m quick to learn
IdiocracyToday@reddit
I just don’t understand how people in the industry of programming can be like that. Like I haven’t spent a single year of my career doing the same thing. Did I “forget” that one year I worked on a project rewriting single threaded C code into multi thread C++? No even though that was 10 years ago and I haven’t touched C since. If your ability to be a programmer hinges on doing the same exact thing every single year, you were bound to fail with or without AI.
pyrrho314@reddit
When I don't understand, I code and it explains (often badly, wrongly) and when I understand, I tell it and it does what I want until I don't understand and then I code, and it explains (often badly, wrongly) and when I understand, I can make it understand and if we both understand it can write the code until I don't understand then I code, and .... so on.
Proxiconn@reddit
Have to go cold turkey, can't do coke on Tuesday and heroin on Thursday and then do nothing over the weekend.
It's either all in or all out.
gankylosaurus@reddit
I want to downvote you for your hubris and upvote you for your self-awareness at the same time.
JGhostThing@reddit
You should *not* be using AI to generate code, as long as you are learning. Learning involves fixing failures, and AI hides these from you.
Ecstatic_Athlete_646@reddit
Oh and that's another beef I have with it because no one should stop learning. They say seniors should be using it but seniors should be learning too or they risk becoming irrelevant. Technically no one is safe using entirely AI without supplanting it with a significant amount of "boring" classic coding unless they just have the most incredible reading comprehension and gain nothing by typing. Photographic memory types are safe
Fearless_Weather_206@reddit
When the Csuite mandates AI usage for everything like they know better than programmers 💩🍿🤡 it’s easy for them to blame the coders when it goes south for not doing enough to warn them 🤡
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
Superfruitdrastic@reddit
Also reading this back the company thing sounds bigger than it is, the four of us just pick someone's house and fail and learn together lmao
AceLamina@reddit
You've already took the first step of realizing this issue, now you can continue by training your brain again
MineralDragon@reddit
When I was a senior in High School I was a delivery driver. This was before I had a smart phone, no GPS. I developed incredibly robust spatial memory from driving in a major city with no need for digital navigation.
The next year I got a smartphone and moved to a far smaller town for college. I used the phone for directions instead of my previous method of mentally mapping out street references to get to different locations. I used my smartphone constantly to navigate. By the end of 4 years I could barely recollect where anything was in the small college town.
I realized how bad my spatial memory and personal navigation skills atrophied. It’s like my brain immediately sought to avoid putting in any real effort to learn where anything was once the opportunity allowed for it.
After that I moved again and changed my behaviors. I make a concerted effort to try to navigate to a new location independently if it’s local. I look up traffic and such before heading out and make my own way. The maps app is a back up. My spatial mapping immediately improved.
There is a balance to tools, and you need to make sure you are not trading off actual skills and too much cognitive overhead when using them.
kagato87@reddit
This is a natural response from the brain (and body). Our bodies are adapted to have to expend energy to acquire food, and for it to not be guaranteed. So naturally if it can conserve energy, it will.
That mental model isn't free. It requires effort to store it in your noggin!
davion303@reddit
"Its a tool bro! Its a tool bro! Just use it like a tool bro its just a tool bro!!!"
Wait till ur boss gives you a week to do something that takes 3 weeks. Shit sucks
bokonator@reddit
get a better boss
davion303@reddit
A boss who doesnt do that is a bad boss now my brother
bokonator@reddit
You can have a boss t hat does that and then the job actually takes longer as you cut corners, or you can have a boss that understand that shit takes time and gives you the space to do your job properly.
A 3 week job is a 3 week job. A 3 week job isn't a 1 week job.
I've had a boss before this one that was like that, constantly saying we have to go faster. You know what happened ? We now have a better boss that makes us way more money.
Tripyor1@reddit
In this market?
binarycow@reddit
Yo, I was given two weeks to do a 6-12 month task.
themightyspitz@reddit
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” -Frank Herbert, Dune
quiet-peak-7040@reddit
I get where you're coming from. I've seen this pattern with my math skills after using calculators too much. It's a valid concern about AI over-reliance.
Effective_Promise581@reddit
Use AI like you would use a very smart colleague who likes to mentor you. Dont ask him to do your work, ask his to check your work or debug your work or give advice.
Helpjuice@reddit
So I have seen this in big tech and the current place I am at and it is a really sad thing to see happen. For those not able to at a professional level do what their resume says without the usage of any AI or internet find out the hard way they are no longer able minded to program at the level that matches their experience.
I had the perfect resume for a candidate, we were extremely happy to meet them and if they could have passed the coding interview they would have gotten the job and a nice juicy signing bonus to go with it.
I had to break the news to the HM that it just not going to workout due to the poor interview performance on the coding interview.
It was so bad we didn't even make it through foundational stuff without having to give them hints and they kept saying I normally google this or have been using AI for so long that this escapes me. I was very happy they weren't cheating and honest but due to their inability to do the basics they just wouldn't have worked out, everything else was exceptional (behavior, system design, etc.) so instead of putting the 3-5 ban hammer on them I recommended they be recycled for other non-software development, computer science researcher roles.
The atrophy of the human capabilities goes down over time when you don't use the skills that have made you so successful on a regular basis. This is why I always recommend people spend regular time actually staying sharp as you never know when you are going to have to interview. I learned this the hard way when I got an offer of a lifetime, but I too had problems at the more advanced concepts that I used to do on a regular but it had been almost a year since I worked with them due to having more leadership opportunities.
Now to make sure I'm never screwing over myself again by not being ready I regularly take the time to practice the foundations and advanced concepts. I also do regular interviews to make sure I am also getting a good signal on my market value and if I need to make changes or pivot to other things to stay in high demand.
NotACoderPleaseHelp@reddit
This is not as bad of a thing as you think. There are benefits to learning, taking long breaks and relearning skills
I've done a shit tonne of hobbies in my life and in general the relearn time is a week or so before the sleepy neurons wake back up.
Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit
Right. Except not only are you not improving anymore, you're also getting worse.
So you're not going to "get back" to a good level in a week, if you were going to be much further ahead had you not stopped learning.
NotACoderPleaseHelp@reddit
Yes and no, it also is a chance to unlearn mistakes.
Now this being said everyone's brain tends to work a little different, and this works best if you are using the off time for other cognitive growth activities, but it gives you a chance to reexamine the content with a fresh perspective.
And quite frankly so long as you are not going decades away from it you should be good.
For me, I take up art about 4-6 months out of the year, the same with programming, same with welding and half a dozen other hobbies. Because at a point it all starts to blur together.
ThrasherThrash@reddit
Thankfully, I find AI to be crap at what I ask it to do. Easier to sort it myself.
Just work on it. Use the internet (it is needed for programming) but avoid AI summaries and read through SO or whatever else comes up. The key is understanding the concept from a related but not exact 1-1 of the problem you are working on.
alwyn@reddit
Wish I could but my bean counter managers will dislike my LOC metrics
McAUTS@reddit
This is not unusual: Our brain needs a lot of energy to store and memorize very complex topics. So the first thing it does is to minimize these storages ASAP if it's not getting used anymore. Hence this rapid degradation in programming.