There's yet another study about how bad AI is for our brains

During university, for an exam in a graduate databases course, I had to manually calculate the number of operations for a query, down to the ones place. We were given an E-R diagram, the schema, and the query. So we had to act as the query planner - build out the B+ tree, check what was most efficient, and do it.

This is by all means a pointless endeavor - no one has had to do this by hand in literally decades. It was also among the hardest cognitive tasks I've ever had to do. After being one of two people to complete the exam in the three allotted hours, I sat outside the lecture hall on a bench for a little while because I though I might faint if I went any further.

I’m beginning to feel the same about writing code by hand. If I can design systems that are useful, performant, and largely maintainable, but the code is written by an LLM, is this harmful? It feels that I spend more time thinking about what problems need to be solved and how best to solve them, instead of writing idiomatic typescript. It’d be hard to convince me that’s a bad thing.

Worth reading the conclusion - makes a good point or two regarding the cumulative effect of using AI and not only the loss of the learning through struggle/time, but also the reference point of how long tasks should take without AI (e.g. we are no willing longer afford the time to learn the hard way, which will impact the younger generation notably).

Is this the same effect that causes managers and people in power to sometimes become... (for lack of a better phrase) stupid and crazy?

edit: Everyone is responding to the "junior" part of my comment without addressing the actual question I'm asking. I should have just said "employees" -- Sorry.

Has anyone else noticed this, as they've scaled up their AI coding use? I've found it harder to stay on task, and it's affected a broad range of my personal activities. I'm able to make incredible things happen with AI tools, but do worry about the personal costs.

With AI I've also witnessed people go crazy going back and forth without even looking carefully at the code (or the compile messages) to figure out what was missing.

I'm pretty sure nobody will read the docs now.

This sounds like something I have seen before: jQuery, Angular, React.

What the article misses is the consequence of destroyed persistence. Once persistence is destroyed people tend to become paranoid, hostile, and irrationally defensive to maintain access to the tool, as in addiction withdrawal.

HN Discussion Here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788845

Just as anything, I believe the dose is the poison. I still find myself thinking about the high-level and decisions, but I spend less cognitive load into library, implementation specifics I can put somewhere else.

Point for discussion: We know that task and context switching imposes substantial cognitive costs, leading to lower and slower performance for a time. I think it is may be reasonable to hypothesize that interacting with a LLM to solve tasks tends to focus the brain on a more strategic level of focus. What do I want to solve? What is my goal? Actually solving individual problems is very different. It is more concrete and mechanistic, requiring a different mode of thought. Switching from the former to the latter is a cognive task switch, where the context changes, and resetting into the new context takes time and that imposes costs. Unless they had a control arm that imposed a task switching cost...

  Unfortunately, given participant feedback and surveys, we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools. The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI, which likely biases downwards our estimate of AI-assisted speedup.

This was a huge red flag! Within a year a large majority of devs became so whiny and lazy that METR couldn't fill the "no AI" bucket for their study - it's not like this was a full-time job, just a quick gig, and it was still too much effort for their poor LLM-addled brains. At the time I thought it was a terrible psychological omen.

I am so glad I don't use this stuff.

The moment that happens, insurance flips tables, OSHA starts asking if they need exposure controls, and employers back down.

And that’s the good scenario! The bad scenario is an employer mandated it, and someone mentally declined to the point they committed a public act of violence.