25 ms·

Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

• misswaterfairy 9mo ago
  It seems this study has been discussed on HN before, though was recently revised very late December 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
  • dang 9mo ago
    Thanks - macroexpanded: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277 - June 2025 (426 comments)
• mettlerse 9mo ago
  Article seems long, need to run it through an LLM.
  • SecretDreams 9mo ago
    When you're done, let us know so we can aggregate your summarized comment with the rest of the thread comments to back out key, human informed, findings.
    • observationist 9mo ago
      Grug no need think big, Grug brain happy. Magic Rock good!
      • jacquesm 9mo ago
        That was still one of the best finds on HN in a long time. https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/ Carson Gross sure knows how to stay in character.
  • lapetitejort 9mo ago
    Doesn't look like anything to me
    • fhd2 9mo ago
      Perfection.
• captain_coffee 9mo ago
  Curious what the long-term effects from the current LLM-based "AI" systems embedded in virtually everything and pushed aggressively will be in let's say 10 years, any strong opinions or predictions on this topic?
  • SecretDreams 9mo ago
    It'll be a lot like giving children all the answers without teaching them how to get the answers for themselves.
  • netsharc 9mo ago
    Hopefully the brainrot will mean older developers, who know how to code the old-fashioned way, don't get replaced so quickly..
    • nly 9mo ago
      Or they'll be fired for not working fast enough, which already happens
  • yesco 9mo ago
    If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this: As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent. Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare. In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer. Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas. Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.
• lacoolj 9mo ago
  Dont even need to read the article if you been using em. You already know just as well as I do how bad it gets. A door has been opened that cant be closed and will trap those who stay too long. Good luck!
  • risyachka 9mo ago
    Yup. This.
    • jaksdfkskf 9mo ago
      [flagged]
  • ragle 9mo ago
    I hate it, but I'm actually counting on this and how it affects my future earning potential as part of my early(ish) retirement plan! I do use them, and I also still do some personal projects and such by hand to stay sharp. Just: they can't mint any more "pre-AI" computer scientists. A few outliers might get it and bang their head on problems the old way (which is what, IMO, yields the problem-solving skills that actually matter) but between: * Not being able to mint any more "pre-AI" junior hires And, even if we could: * Great migration / Covid era overhiring and the corrective layoffs -> hiring freezes and few open junior reqs * Either AI or executives' misunderstandings of it and/or use of it as cover for "optimization" - combined with the Nth wave of offshoring we're in at the moment -> US hiring freezes and few open junior reqs * Jobs and tasks junior hires used to cut their teeth on to learn systems, processes, etc. being automated by AI / RPA -> "don't need junior engineers" The upstream "junior" source for talent our industry needs has been crippled both quantitatively and qualitatively. We're a few years away from a _massive_ talent crunch IMO. My bank account can't wait! Yes, yes. It's analogous to our wizzardly greybeard ancestors prophesying that youngsters' inability to write ASM and compile it in their heads would bring end of days, or insert your similar story from the 90s or 2000s here (or printing press, or whatever). Order of "dumbing down" effect in a space that one way or another always eventually demands the sort of functional intelligence that only rigorous, hard work on hard problems can yield feels completely different, though? Just my $0.02, I could be wrong.
• bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
  “LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work” - why are these studies always so laughably bad? The last one I saw was about smartphone users who do a test and then quit their phone for a month and do the test again and surprisingly do better the second time. Can anyone tell me why they might have paid more attention, been more invested, and done better on the test the second time round right after a month of quitting their phone?
• nothrowaways 9mo ago
  > Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use
• somewhatrandom9 9mo ago
  "Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."
• DocTomoe 9mo ago
  TL;DR: We had one group not do some things, an later found out that they did not learn anything by not doing the things. This is a non-study.
  • keithnz 9mo ago
    no, that isn't accurate. One of the key points is that those previously relying on the LLM still showed reduced cognitive engagement after switching back to unaided writing.
    • DocTomoe 9mo ago
      And how exactly is that surprising? If you wrote two essays, you have more 'cognitive engagement' on the clock as compared to the guy who wrote one essay. In other news: If you've been lifting in the gym for a week, you have more physical engagement than the guy who just came in and lifted for the first time.
      • greggoB 9mo ago
        > And how exactly is that surprising? Isn't the point of a lot of science to empirically demonstrate results which we'd otherwise take for granted as intuitive/obvious? Maybe in AI-literature-land everything published is supposed to be novel/surprising, but that doesn't encompass all of research, last I checked.
        • DocTomoe 9mo ago
          If the title of your study both makes a neurotoxin reference ("This is your brain on drugs", egg, pan, plus pearl-clutching) AND introduces a concept stolen and abused from IT and economics (cognitive debt? Implies repayment and 'refactoring', that is not what they mean, though) ... I expect a bit more than 'we tested this very obvious common sense thing, and lo and behold, it is just as a five year old would have predicted.'
          • 9mo ago
• orliesaurus 9mo ago
  i think i can guess this article without reading it: ive never been on major drugs, even medically speaking yet using AI makes me feels like i am on some potent drug that eating my brain. what's state management? what's this hook? who cares, send it to claude or whatever
  • tuckwat 9mo ago
    It's just a different way of writing code. Today you at least need to understand best practices to help steer towards a good architecture. In the near future there will be no developers needed at all for the majority of apps.
    • alt187 9mo ago
      Becoming a moron is a different way of writing code?
      • EinigeKreise 9mo ago
        It's all I've ever known.
    • cluckindan 9mo ago
      That just means the majority of apps don’t actually serve much of a purpose
      • noman-land 9mo ago
        What if the future of apps is serving a few dozen instead of a few billion?
    • joseangel_sc 9mo ago
      this comment will age badly
    • akomtu 9mo ago
      You may be right, but for a different reason: the majority apps on Apple and Google appstores will be 100% AI generated crapware.
• foota 9mo ago
  Imo programming is fairly different between vibes based not looking at it at all and using AI to complete tasks. I still feel engaged when I'm more actively "working with" the AI as opposed to a more hands off "do X for me". I don't know that the same makes as much sense to evaluate in an essay context, because it's not really the same. I guess the equivalent would be having an existing essay (maybe written by yourself, maybe not) and using AI to make small edits to it like "instead of arguing X, argue Y then X" or something. Interestingly I find myself doing a mix of both "vibing" and more careful work, like the other day I used it to update some code that I cared about and wanted to understand better that I was more engaged in, but also simultaneously to make a dashboard that I used to look at the output from the code that I didn't care about at all so long as it worked. I suspect that the vibe coding would be more like drafting an essay from the mental engagement POV.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    AI is not a great partner to code with. For me I just use it to do some boilerplates and fill in the tedious gaps. Even for translations its bad if you know both languages. The biggest issues is that AI constantly tries to steer you wrong, its very subtle in programming that you only realize it a week later when you get stuck in a vibe coding quagmire.
    • foota 9mo ago
      shrug YMMV. I was definitely a bit of of a luddite for a while, and I still definitely don't consider myself an "AI person", but I've found them useful. I can have them do legitimately useful things, with varying degrees of supervision. I wouldn't ask Cursor to go off and write software from scratch that I need to take ownership of, but I'm reasonably comfortable at this point having it make small changes under direction and with guidance. The project I mentioned above was adding otel tracing to something, and it wrote a tracae viewing UI that has all the features I need and works well, without me having to spend hours getting it up set up.
  • uriegas 9mo ago
    I find it very useful for code comprehension. For writing code it still struggles (at least codex) and sometimes I feel I could have written the code myself faster rather than correct it every time it does something wrong. Jeremy Howard argues that we should use LLMs to help us learn, once you let it reason for you then things go bad and you start getting cognitive debt. I agree with this.
• falloutx 9mo ago
  I think a lot more people, especially at the higher end of the pay scale, are in some kind of AI psychosis. I have heard people at work talk about how they are using chatGPT to quick health advice, some are asking it for gym advice and others are just saying they just dump entire research reports into it and get the summary.
  • mannanj 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • greggoB 9mo ago
      > Similar to the mass psychosis we were hearing about during COVID Can you be more specific and/or provide some references? The "demonstrating curiosity about controversial topics" part is sounding like vaccine skepticism, though I don't recall ever hearing that being referred to as any kind of "psychosis".
      • mannanj 9mo ago
        Noting that it is straw man to connect my argument with vaccine skepticism. The mass psychosis was that early on in the COVID response, we were hearing so much early advice from people that were ahead of CDC/FDA, things like: - Masks work (CDC/FDA discouraged, then flip-flopped and took credit for these things) despite it originating from Scott Alexander and skeptic communities like his, I also heard it from Tim Ferriss - Ivermectin, Mega dosing Vitamins like Vitamin D and C, Povidone Iodine (known disinfectant people use: claimed to be "bleach" by misinformation media) - we know they still have Little to no downside and the psychosis was to label any critical thinking about ideas like nutrition and personal health to help with "COVID" as anti-COVID and anti-vaccine. Psychosis like attack, straw mans, Ad Hominems shutting down critical thinking and curiosity as psychosis - Asking about "Hey if I got COVID before, that immunity is as robust if not more than vaccine, what evidence supports I need the vaccine?" was shut down despite it being robust and sound questioning to ask. Curiosity was shut down, psychosis was to jump on all questioners as anti-vaccine and vaccine skeptics, calling them murderers often by sensationalist papers. Does that answer your question, and feel referential for you. Let me know what you are expecting and I can deliver better references. I think you've heard about or are probably familiar with all the examples I used though.(Another psychosis I just thought of: To this day the hostile, discriminatory, lock-step vocal cancel-culture class of opinion that was blindly sent to anyone who questioned mainstream covid policy during that time was so much like the biggest example of psychosis I've ever seen. That wa when I first heard of the term "mass psychosis")
• netsharc 9mo ago
  An obvious comparison is probably the habitual usage of GPS navigation. Some people blindly follow them and some seemingly don't even remember routes they routinely take.
  • nerdsniper 9mo ago
    I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness. It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time. My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews through thinking tokens. The competitive nature of it keeps me focused, and it’s rewarding when I win with a faster or better solution.
    • netsharc 9mo ago
      Yeah, I'm a North-Up cult member too, after seeing a behind the scenes video of Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear suggesting it, claiming "never get lost again".
    • Liftyee 9mo ago
      I haven't tried this technique yet, sounds interesting. Living in a city where phone-snatching thieves are widely reported on built my habit of memorising the next couple steps quickly (e.g. 2nd street on the left, then right by the station), then looking out for them without the map. North-Up helps anyways because you don't have to separately figure out which erratic direction the magnetic compass has picked this time (maybe it's to do with the magnetic stuff I EDC.)
    • layman51 9mo ago
      That's a great tip, but I know some people hate that because there is some cognitive load if they rely more on visuals and have to think more about which way to turn or face when they first start the route, or have to make turns on unfamiliar routes. I also wanted to mention that just spending some time looking at the maps and comparing differences in each services' suggested routes can be helpful for developing direction awareness of a place. I think this is analogous to not locking yourself into a particular LLM. Lastly, I know that some apps might have an option to give you only alerts (traffic, weather, hazards) during your usual commute so that you're not relying on turn-by-turn instructions. I think this is interesting because I had heard that many years ago, Microsoft was making something called "Microsoft Soundscape" to help visually impaired users develop directional awareness.
• xenophonf 9mo ago
  I'm very impressed. This isn't a paper so much as a monograph. And I'm very inclined to agree with the results of this study, which makes me suspicious. To what journal was this submitted? Where's the peer review? Has anyone gone through the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872) and picked it apart?
  • DocTomoe 9mo ago
    I love the parts where they point out that human evaluators gave wildly different evaluations as compared to an AI evaluator, and openly admitted they dislike a more introverted way of writing (fewer flourishes, less speculation, fewer random typos, more to the point, more facts) and prefer texts with a little spunk in it (= content doesn't ultimately matter, just don't bore us.)
• jchw 9mo ago
  I try my best to make meta-comments sparingly, but, it's worth noting the abstract linked here isn't really that long. Gloating that you didn't bother to read it before commenting, on a brief abstract for a paper about "cognitive debt" due to avoiding the use of cognitive skills, has a certain sad irony to it. The study seems interesting, and my confirmation bias also does support it, though the sample size seems quite small. It definitely is a little worrisome, though framing it as being a step further than search engine use makes it at least a little less concerning. We probably need more studies like this, across more topics with more sample size, but if we're all forced to use LLMs at work, I'm not sure how much good it will do in the end.
• Der_Einzige 9mo ago
  Good. Humans don’t need to waste their mental energy on tasks that other systems can do well. I want a life of leisure. I don’t want to do hard things anymore. Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market, and it’s easier to convince them that whatever slop work you submitted after 0.1 seconds of effort “isn’t bad, it’s certainly great at delving into the topic!” Also, monkey see, monkey speak: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
  • latexr 9mo ago
    > Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market I hope you’re being facetious, as otherwise that’s a selfish view which will come back to bite you. If you live in a society, what other do and how they behave affects you too. A John Green quote on public education feels appropriate: > Let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools even though I personally don’t have a kid in school. It’s because I don’t like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.
    • Der_Einzige 9mo ago
      You could maybe give this book a read to understand why calling me "selfish" is a compliment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
      • latexr 9mo ago
        It was neither a compliment nor an insult, only a descriptor. I didn’t call you selfish (I don’t know you), but one particular view you described. For all I know, you may be the most altruistic person in other areas of your life, but that particular view is unambiguously selfish. And the least defensible kind of selfish, too, because it only benefits you in the short term but harms you in the long run. Either way, that’s not how compliments nor insults work. The intent is what matters, not the word. For example, amongst finance bros, calling each other a “ruthless motherfucker” can be a compliment. But if your employee calls you that after a round of layoffs, it’s an insult.
• softwaredoug 9mo ago
  Druids used to decry that literacy caused people to lose their ability to memorize sacred teachings. And they’re right! But literacy still happened and we’re all either dumber or smarter for it.
  • EGreg 9mo ago
    Druids? Socrates was famously against books far earlier. Funny enough, the reason he gave against books has now finally been addressed by LLMs.
    • firstthrowaway 9mo ago
      Or, irony was being employed and Socrates wasn’t against books, but was instead noting it’s the powerful who are against them for their facilitating the sharing of ideas across time and space more powerfully than the spoken word ever could. The books are why we even know his name, let alone the things said.
  • alt187 9mo ago
    It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another. Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head. But they don't come into effect into any of those processes. So it's an immensely bad metaphor. A more apt one is the GPS, that only leaves you with practice. That's where LLMs come in, and obliterate every single one of those pillars on any mental skill. You never have to learn a thing deeply, because it's doing the knowing for you. You never have to practice, because the LLM does all the writing for you. And of course, when it's wrong, you're not wrong. So nothing you learn. There are ways to exploit LLMs to make your brain grow, instead of shrink. You could make them into personalized teachers, catering to each student at their own rhythm. Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions. Only employ them for tasks you already know how to make perfectly. Don't depend on them. But this isn't the future OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna gift us. Not today, and not in a hundred years, because it's always gonna be more profitable to run a sycophant. If we want LLMs to be the "better" instead of the "worse", we'll have to fight for it.
• potatoman22 9mo ago
  I've definitely noticed an association between how much I vibe code something and how good my internal model of the system is. That bit about LLM users not being able to quote their essay resonates too: "oh we have that unit test?"
• pfannkuchen 9mo ago
  Talking to LLMs reminds me of arguing with a certain flavor of Russian. When you clarify based on a misunderstanding of theirs, they act like your clarification is a fresh claim which avoids them ever having to backpedal. It strikes me as intellectually dishonest in a way I find very grating. I do find it interesting though as the incentives that produce the behavior in both cases may be similar.
  • boomlinde 9mo ago
    "What you said just now isn't true at all and you should reconsider the premise" "Exactly!"
• bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
  I’m gonna make a new study one where I give the participant really shitty tools and one more give them good tools to build something and see which one takes more brain power
  • fabdav 9mo ago
    Agreed. "Reduced muscle development in farmers using a tractor mounted plow: Over four months, mechanical plow users consistently underperformed at lifting weights with respect to the control group who had been using spades. These results raise concerns about the long-term implications of tractor mounted plow reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into tractor mounted plow role in farming."
• trees101 9mo ago
  Skill issue. I'm far more interactive when reading with LLMs. I try things out instead of passively reading. I fact check actively. I ask dumb questions that I'd be embarrassed to ask otherwise. There's a famous satirical study that "proved" parachutes don't work by having people jump from grounded planes. This study proves AI rots your brain by measuring people using it the dumbest way possible.
• mrvmochi 9mo ago
  I wonder what would happen if we used RL to minimize the user's cognitive debt. Could this lead to the creation of an effective tutor model?
  • alt187 9mo ago
    Definitely, but it won't be a creation of any known AI companies, anytime soon. I have a hard time to see how this would be profitable. It also goes against the main ethos of the AI sect to "stress-test" the AI against everything and everyone, so there's that.
• yndoendo 9mo ago
  How can you validate ML content when you don't have educated people? Thinking everything ML produces is just shorting the brain. I see AI wars as creating coherent stories. Company X starts using ML and they believe what was produced is valid and can grow their stock. Reality is that Company Y poised the ML and the product or solution will fail, not right away but over time.
• spongebobstoes 9mo ago
  the article suggests that the LLM group had better essays as graded by both human and AI reviewers, but they used less brain power this doesn't seem like a clear problem. perhaps people can accomplish more difficult tasks with LLM assistance, and in those more difficult tasks still see full brain engagement? using less brain power for a better result doesn't seem like a clear problem. it might reveal shortcomings in our education system, since these were SAT style questions. I'm sure calculator users experience the same effects vs mental mathematics
  • ETH_start 9mo ago
    Bingo. Overall it's a massive plus.
• blackqueeriroh 9mo ago
  I encourage folks to listen to brilliant psychologist for software teams Cat Hicks [1] and her wife, teaching neuroscientist Ashley Juavinett [2] on their excellent podcast, Change, Technically discussing the myriad problems with this study: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2396236/episodes/17378968 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2396236/episodes/17378968 1: https://www.catharsisinsight.com https://www.catharsisinsight.com 2: https://ashleyjuavinett.com https://ashleyjuavinett.com
  • probably_wrong 9mo ago
    I'm not a fan of "TL;DR" but I think 52 minutes would qualify. I jumped to a random point of the transcript and found just platitudes, which didn't quite hook me into listening to all of it. How about some more info on what their main conclusions are?
    • internet_points 9mo ago
      It's a podcast, it goes back and forth between high and low density content. I tried listening to it while working and sometimes had to pause it because it got deep into e.g. explaining EEG, and then it's back to laughing at random stuff.
    • albumen 9mo ago
      They view the framing of the MIT paper not just as bad science, but as a dangerous social tool that uses brain data to "consign people" to being less worthy or "stupid" for using cognitive aids. It flags the paper's alarmist findings as "pseudoscience" designed to provoke fear rather than provide rigorous insight. They highlight several "red flags" in the study's design: lack of a coherent scientific framework, methodological errors like typos, and reliance on invented, undefined terms such as "cognitive debt". They challenge the interpretation of EEG results, explaining that while the paper frames a 55% reduction in connectivity as evidence that a user's "brain sucks," such data could instead indicate increased neural efficiency, an alternative explanation the authors ignore. (EEG measures broad, noisy signals from outside the skull and is better understood as a rough index of brain state than as a precise window into specific thoughts or “intelligence.”) The hosts condemn the study’s "bafflingly weak" logic and ableist rhetoric, and advise skepticism toward "science communicators" who might profit from selling hardware or supplements related to their findings: one of the paper's lead authors, Nataliya Kosmyna, is associated with the MIT Media Lab and the development of AttentivU, a pair of glasses designed to monitor brain activity and engagement. By framing LLM use as creating a "cognitive debt," the researchers create a market for their own solution: hardware that monitors and alerts the user when they are "under-engaged". The AttentivU system can provide haptic or audio feedback when attention drops, essentially acting as the "scaffold" for the very cognitive deficits the paper warns against. The research is part of the "Fluid Interfaces" group at MIT, which frequently develops Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) systems like "Brain Switch" and "AVP-EEG". This context supports the hosts' suspicion that the paper’s "cognitive debt" theory may be designed to justify a need for these monitoring tools.
• k8sToGo 9mo ago
  The title is missing an important part "... for Essay Writing Task"
  • phyzome 9mo ago
    Or "...For the Tasks That Were Measured". You can always complain that it's not universal enough.
• carterschonwald 9mo ago
  idk, if anything I’m thinking more. The idea that I might be able to build everything I’ve ever planned out. At least the way I’m using them, it’s like the perfect assistive device for my flavor of ADHD — I get an interactive notebook I can talk through crazy stuff with. No panacea for sure, but I’m so much higher functioning it’s surreal. I’m not even using em in the volume many folks claim, more like pair programming with a somewhat mentally ill junior colleague. Much faster than I’d otherwise be. this actually does include a crazy amount of long form latex expositions on a bunch of projects im having a blast iterating on. i must be experiencing what its almost like not having adhd
  • notrealyme123 9mo ago
    I am currently writing a paper and I am thinking exactly the same. That must be how normal people feel.
  • skrebbel 9mo ago
    Can you elaborate on how you use AI for this? Do you do it for coding or for “everything?”
  • ensocode 9mo ago
    Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. It’s more like having a reliable way to make fire — so we stop obsessing over sparks and start focusing on building something more important.
    • jack_pp 9mo ago
      Instead of being the architect, engineer, plumber, electrician, carpenter you can (most of the time) just be the architect/planner. You for sure need to know how everything works in case LLMs mess the low level stuff up but it sure is nice not needing to lay bricks and dig ditches anymore and just build houses.
      • discreteevent 9mo ago
        It won't turn most people into architects. It will turn them into PMs. The function of PMs is important but without engineers you are not going to build a sustainable system. And an LLM is not an engineer.
• coopykins 9mo ago
  When I have to put together a quick fix. I reach out to Claude Code these days. I know I can give it the specifics and, Im my recent experience, it will find the issue and propose a fix. Now, I have two options: I can trust it or I can dig in myself and understand why it's happening myself. I sacrifice gaining knowledge for time. I often choose the later, and put my time in areas I think are more important than this, but I'm aware of it. If you give up your hands-on interaction with a system, you will lose your insight about it. When you build an application yourself, you know every part of it. When you vibe code, trying to debug something in there is a black box of code you've never seen before. That is one of the concerns I have when people suggest that LLMs are great for learning. I think the opposite, they're great for skipping 'learning' and just get the results. Learning comes from doing the grunt work. I use LLMs to find stuff often, when I'm researching or I need to write an ADR, but I do the writing myself, because otherwise it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you know what the 'LLM' is talking about, when in fact you are clueless about it. I find it harder to write about something I'm not familiar with, and then I know I have to look more into it.
  • wtetzner 9mo ago
    I think LLMs can be great for learning, but not if you're using them to do work for you. I find them most valuable for explaining concepts I've been trying to learn, but have gotten stuck and am struggling to find good resources for.
  • ensocode 9mo ago
    > I think the opposite, they're great for skipping 'learning' and just get the results. yes, and cars skip the hours of walking, planes skip weeks of swimming, calculators skip the calculating ...
• mcv 9mo ago
  This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using Brandes-Köpf for node positioning. I had no prior experience with it (and I went in clearly underestimating how complex it was), and AI was a tremendous help in getting a basic understanding of the algorithm, its many steps and sub-algorithms, the subtle interactions and unspoken assumptions in it. But letting it write the actual code was a mistake. That's what kept me from understanding the intricacies, from truly engaging with the problem, which led me to keep relying on the AI to fix issues, but at that point the AI clearly also had no real idea what it was doing, and just made things worse. So instead of letting the AI see the real code, I switched from the Copilot IDE plugin to the standalone Copilot 365 app, where it could explain the principles behind every step, and I would debug and fix the code and develop actual understanding of what was going on. And I finally got back into that coding flow again. So don't let the AI take over your actual job, but use it as an interactive encyclopedia. That works much better for this kind of complex problem.
  • isolli 9mo ago
    This mirrors my experience exactly. We have to learn how to tame the beast.
    • sevenzero 9mo ago
      [flagged]
    • sothatsit 9mo ago
      I think we all just need to avoid the trap of using AI to circumvent understanding. I think that’s where most problems with AI lie. If I understand a problem and AI is just helping me write or refactor code, that’s all good. If I don’t understand a problem and I’m using AI to help me investigate the codebase or help me debug, that’s okay too. But if I ever just let the AI do its thing without understanding what it’s doing and then I just accept the results, that’s where things go wrong. But if we’re serious about avoiding the trap of AI letting us write working code we don’t understand, then AI can be very useful. Unfortunately the trap is very alluring. A lot of vibe coding falls into the trap. You can get away with it for small stuff, but not for serious work.
• samthebaam 9mo ago
  This has been the same argument since the invention of pen and paper. Yes, the tools reduce engagement and immediate recall and memory, but also free up energy to focus on more and larger problems. Seems to focus only on the first part and not on the other end of it.
  • wesleywt 9mo ago
    Without the engagement on the material you are studying you will not have the context to know and therefore focus on the larger problem. Deep immersion in the material allows you to make the connections. With AI spoon feeding you will not have that immersion.
• culi 9mo ago
  My friend works with people in their 20s. She recently brought up her struggles to do the math in her head for when to clock in/out for their lunches (30 minutes after an arbitrary time). The young coworker's response was "Oh I just put it into ChatGPT" The kids are using ChatGPT for simple maths...
  • booleandilemma 9mo ago
    It's ok this is just the next level of human evolution. We haven't needed to know how to do basic math since the calculator. Nowadays our AIs can read and write for us too. More obsolete skills. We can focus on higher level things now. No more focusing on sparks, we can focus on building something important. We don't have an attention span over 5 seconds anyway thanks to social media. If you don't get where I'm coming from you probably don't have ADHD but that's fine.
    • forsakenharmony 9mo ago
      you need a spark to start a fire, if you offload everything to the LLM you won't understand the higher level things
      • booleandilemma 9mo ago
        Completely agree fwiw. My comment sarcastically paraphrased a few other AI slop lovers I've seen in this comment section.
  • Quothling 9mo ago
    That'll lead to interesting results. I used a couple of LLM's for my blood bowl statistics, and they get rather simple math wrong. Which makes sense, they aren't build for math after all. It's wild how wrong they can get results though, I'd add the same prompt to 6 different AI's and they'd all get it wrong in 6 different ways. On a side note, the most hilarious part of it was when I asked gemini to do something for me in Google Sheets and it kept refering to it as Excel. Even after I corrected it.
  • 9mo ago
• sdoering 9mo ago
  This reminds me of the recurring pattern with every new medium: Socrates worried writing would destroy memory, Gutenberg's critics feared for contemplation, novels were "brain softening," TV was the "idiot box." That said, I'm not sure "they've always been wrong before" proves they're wrong now. Where I'm skeptical of this study: - 54 participants, only 18 in the critical 4th session - 4 months is barely enough time to adapt to a fundamentally new tool - "Reduced brain connectivity" is framed as bad - but couldn't efficient resource allocation also be a feature, not a bug? - Essay writing is one specific task; extrapolating to "cognition in general" seems like a stretch Where the study might have a point: Previous tools outsourced partial processes - calculators do arithmetic, Google stores facts. LLMs can potentially take over the entire cognitive process from thinking to formulating. That's qualitatively different. So am I ideologically inclined to dismiss this? Maybe. But I also think the honest answer is: we don't know yet. The historical pattern suggests cognitive abilities shift rather than disappear. Whether this shift is net positive or negative - ask me again in 20 years. [Edit]: Formatting
  • duskdozer 9mo ago
    Not sure "they've always been wrong before" applies to TV being the idiot box and everything after
  • cimi_ 9mo ago
    > The historical pattern suggests cognitive abilities shift rather than disappear. Shift to what? This? https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
    • darkwater 9mo ago
      What the hell have I just read (or at least skimmed)?? I cannot understand if the author is: a) serious, but we live on different planets b) serious with the idea, tongue-in-check in the style and using a lot of self-irony c) an ironic piece with some real idea d) he is mocking AI maximalists
      • 9mo ago
• newswasboring 9mo ago
  "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." - Socrates on Writing.
• usrbinbash 9mo ago
  No shit? When I outsource thinking to a chatbot, my brain gets less good at thinking? What a complete and utter surprise. /s
• curl-up 9mo ago
  Prompt they use in `Figure 28.` is a complete mess, all the way from starting it with "Your are an expert" to the highly overlapping categories to the poorly specified JSON without clear direction on how to fill in those fields. Similar mess with can be found in `Figure 34.`, with an added bonus of "DO NOT MAKE MISTAKES!" and "If you make a mistake you'll be fined $100". Also, why are all of these research papers always using such weak LLMs to do anything? All of this makes their results very questionable, even if they mostly agree with "common intuition".
• canxerian 9mo ago
  My use case for ChatGPT is to delegate mental effort on certain tasks, so that I can pour my mental energy on to things I truly care about, like family, certain hobbies and relationships. If you are feeling over reliant on these tools then I quickfix that's worked me is to have real conversations with real people. Organise a coffee date if you must.
• kachapopopow 9mo ago
  I mean I think this is okay I can't do math in my head at all and it hasn't stopped me from solving mathematical problems. You might not be able to write code, but you are still the primary problem solver (for now). I have actually been improving in other fields instead like design and general cleanliness of the code, future extensability and bug prediction. My brain is not 'normal' either so your mileage might vary.
• treenode 9mo ago
  I don't see why this is unexpected. 'Using your brain actively vs evaluating AI' is neurally equivalent to 'active recall vs reading notes'.
• 0dayz 9mo ago
  It's a bit tiring seeing these extreme positions on Ai sticking out time and time again, Ai is not some cure all for code stagnation or creating products nor is it destroying productivity. It's a tool, and this study at most indicates that we don't use as much brain power for the specific tasks of coding but do they look into for instance maintenance or management of code? As that is what you'll be relegated to when vibe coding.
  • yomismoaqui 9mo ago
    Lukewarm opinions on the Internet? Where do you think we are...? We only deal in aboslutes here.
    • 0dayz 9mo ago
      Oh crap you're right. Ai is not a tool, you the developer is!
• ReptileMan 9mo ago
  I have a whole phonebook of numbers I know by heart, all of them before my first mobile phone. Not a single one remember afterwards. A lot of stuff I remembered when there was no google, afterwards - remembering how to find it by using google. And so on.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• moron4hire 9mo ago
  ChatGPT got me over my imposter syndrome. Back when it came out, it was all the rage at my company and we were all trying it for different things. After a while, I realized, if people were willing to accept the bullshit that LLMs put out, then I had been worrying about nothing all along. That, plus getting an LLM to write anything with meaning takes putting the meaning in the prompt, pushed me to finally stop agonizing over emails and just write the damn things as simply and concisely as possible. I don't need a bullshit engine inflating my own words to say what I already know, just to have someone on the other end use the same bullshit engine to remove all that extra fluff to summarize. I can just write the point straight away and send it immediately. You can literally just say anything in an email and nobody is going to say it's right or wrong, because they themselves don't know. Hell, they probably aren't even reading it. Most of the time I'm replying just to let someone know I read their email so they don't have to come to my office later and ask me if I read the email. Every time someone says the latest release is a "game changer", I check back out of morbid curiosity. Still don't see what games have changed.
• HPsquared 9mo ago
  It's a specific case of the general symptoms of "your brain on lazy shortcuts"
• knitef 9mo ago
  Please take this to top.
• MarkusWandel 9mo ago
  Junk food and sedentary lifestyle for your brain. What could possibly go wrong.
• Elizer0x0309 9mo ago
  There's a skill of problem solving that will differentiate winners versus losers. I'm so grateful for AI and always use it to help get stuff done while also documenting the rational it takes to go from point A to B. Although it has failed many times, I've had ZERO problems backtracking, debugging its thinking, understand what it has done and where it has failed. We definitely need to bring back courses on "theory of knowledge" and the "Art of problem" solving etc.
• HPsquared 9mo ago
  Full title is clearer: "when using an AI assistant for Essay Writing Task"
• windowpains 9mo ago
  I wonder if a similar thing makes managers dumb. As a manager, you have people doing work you oversee, a very similar dynamic to using an AI assistant. Sometimes the AI/subordinate makes a mistake, so you have to watch for that, but for the most part they can be trusted. If that’s true, then maybe we could leverage what we know about good management of human subordinates and apply it to AI interaction, and vice versa.
• jgalt212 9mo ago
  In some sense, LLMs are making me better at critical thinking. e.g. I must first check this answer to see if it's real or hallucinated. How do I verify this answer? Those are good skills.
• lunias 9mo ago
  "This is your brain on drugs". Leave me alone, I'm tapped in. There is no reality, only the perception of it.
• moffers 9mo ago
  I didn’t read the entire details, but I wonder if only working on one thing at a time has an impact here. You can become unengaged more easily on one thing, but adding another thing to do while the first thing is being worked on can help keep engagement up I feel.
• blutoot 9mo ago
  There’s only one solution to this problem at this point. Make AI significantly less affordable and accessible. Raise the prices of Pro / Plus / max / ultra tiers, introduce time limits, especially for minors (like screen time) when the LLM can detect age better. This will be a win-win solution: (a) people will be forced to go back to “old ways” of doing whatever it is that AI was doing it for them, (b) we won’t need as many data-centers as the AI companies are projecting today.
  • xlbuttplug2 9mo ago
    Or simply embrace ignorance. Why hold on to things you don't use? Accept AI as an extension to your brain, and let the now dormant parts atrophy. Yes, you will be vulnerable should you lose access to AI at some point, but the same goes for a limb. You will adapt.
• ETH_start 9mo ago
  It takes real effort to maintain a solid understanding of the subject matter when using AI. That is the core takeaway of the study to me, and it lines up with something I have vaguely noticed over time. What makes this especially tricky is that the downside is very stealthy. You do not feel yourself learning less in the moment. Performance stays high, things feel easy, and nothing obviously breaks. So unless someone is actively monitoring their own understanding, it is very easy to drift into a state where you are producing decent-looking work without actually having a deep grasp of what you are doing. That is dangerous in the long run, because if you do not really understand a subject, it will limit the quality and range of work you can produce later. This means people need to be made explicitly aware of this effect, and individually they need to put real effort into checking whether they actually understand what they are producing when they use AI. That said, I also think it is important to not get an overly negative takeaway from the study. Many of the findings are exactly what you would expect if AI is functioning as a form of cognitive augmentation. Over time, you externalize more of the work to the tool. That is not automatically a bad thing. Externalization is precisely why tools increase productivity. When you use AI, you can often get more done because you are spending less cognitive effort per unit of output. And this gets to what I see as the study's main limitation. It compares different groups on a fixed unit of output, which implicitly assumes that AI users will produce the same amount of work as non-AI users. But that is not how AI is actually used in the real world. In practice, people often use AI to produce much more output, not the same output with less effort. If you hold output constant, of course the AI group will show lower cognitive engagement. A more realistic scenario is that AI users increase their output until their cognitive load is similar to before, just spread across more work. That dimension is not captured by the experimental design.
• jaypatelani 9mo ago
  But seeing posts like this also helps one wonder we might need AI more than we think https://www.reddit.com/r/Indian_flex/s/JMqcavbxqu https://www.reddit.com/r/Indian_flex/s/JMqcavbxqu
• morpheos137 9mo ago
  I must use AI differently than most because I find it stimulates deep thinking (not necessarily productive). I don't ask for answers. I ask for constraints and invariants and test them dialecticaly. The power in LLM is in finding deep associations of pattern which the human mind can then validate. LLMs are best used in my opinion not as an oracle of truth or an assistant but as a fast collective mental latent space look up tool. If you have a concept or a specification you can use the LLM to find paths to develop it that you might not have been aware of. You get out what you put in and critical thinking is always key. I believe the secret power in LLMs lies not so much in the transformer model but in the meaning inherent in language. With the right language you can shape output to reveal structure you might not have realized otherwise. We are seeing this power even now in LLMs proving Erdos problems or problems in group theory. Yes the machine may struggle to count the 'r's in strawberry but it can discern abstract relations. An interesting visual exercise to see latent information structure in language is to pixelize a large corpus as bit map by translating the characters to binary then run various transforms on it and what emerges is not a picture of random noise but a fractal like chaos of "worms" or "waves." This is what LLMs are navigating in their high dimensional latent space. Words are not just arbitrary symbols but objects on a connected graph.
• stainablesteel 9mo ago
  i honestly can't understand people using AI to do things for them, the only real thing I'll have it do for me is write code if I'm feeling lazy, but I always know it's going to make mistakes and I'll have to manually skim through it depending how important it is for me, it's purely a research tool that I can ask infinite questions to
• LogicFailsMe 9mo ago
  Now do infotainment versus reading a newspaper and reality television versus reading a novel.
• lukeinator42 9mo ago
  I think it's worth looking at this commentary on the study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00856 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00856. It aligns with a lot of our intuitions, but the study should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.
  • nospice 9mo ago
    I'm going to lose my mind. This commentary is almost certainly LLM generated.
• wintorez 9mo ago
  Use it or lose it...
• casey2 9mo ago
  The goal of any study is to build a mental model in your head. The math curriculum for example is based on analysis so we gain an intuitive feel for physics and engineering. If the utility of building a model for research is low (essentially 0 since the advent of the internet) this should be a specialist skill, not general education. A general education should focus on structure, all mental models built shall reinforce one another. For specific recommendations, completely replace the current Euler inspired curricula with one based on category theory. Strive to make all home and class work multimedia, multi-discipline presentations. Seriously teach one constructed meta-language from kindergarten. And stop passing along students who fail, clearly communicate the requirements. I believe this is vital for students. Think about Student-AI interaction. Does this thing the AI is telling me fit with my understanding of the world, if it does they will accept it. If the student can think structurally the mismatch will be as obvious as a square peg in a round hole. A simple check for an isomorphism. Essentially expediting a proof certificate of the model output.
• j45 9mo ago
  Using AI while in the drivers seat of testing your own understanding and growing it interactively is far more constructive than passive iteration or validation psychosis.
• educasean 9mo ago
  Your brain on calculators. We find that people having to perform mental arithmetics as opposed to people using calculators exhibited more neural activities. They were also able to recall the specific numbers in the equations more. ... So what?
• toss1 9mo ago
  Excellent scientific quantification that Search Engines and Large Language Models reduce the burden of writing — i.e., they make writing easier. The consequence of making anything easier is of course that the person and the brain is less engaged in the work, and remembers less. This debate about using technology for thinking has been ongoing for literally millennia. It is at least as old as Socrates, who criticized writing as harming the ability to think and remember. >>And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”[0] To emphasize: 'instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own ... not a potion for remembering, but for reminding ... the appearance of wisdom, not its reality.' There is no question this is a true dichotomy and trade-off. The question is where on the spectrum we should put ourselves. That answer is likely different for each task or goal. For learning, we should obviously be working at a lower level, but should we go all the way to banning reading and writing and using only oral inquiry and recitation? OTOH, a peer software engineer manager with many Indians in his group said he was constantly trying to get them to write down more of their plans and documentation, because they all wanted to emulate the great mathematician Ramanujan who did much of his work all in his head, and it was slowing down the SE's work. When I have an issue with curing a particular polymer for a project, should I just get the answer from the manufacturer or search engine, or take the sufficient chemistry courses and obtain the proprietary formulas necessary to derive all the relevant reactions in my head? If it is just to deliver one project, obviously just get the answer and move on, but if I'm in the business of designing and manufacturing competing polymers, I should definitely go the long route. As always, it depends. [0] https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
• ge96 9mo ago
  I'm still not a huge user of AI assisted stuff, although lately I have been using Google's AI summaries a lot. I've been writing cloudformation templates and trying to figure out how to bridge resources/policies together.
  • phyzome 9mo ago
    That's wild. Google's AI summaries are so frequently wrong. I hope you understand that you're getting bad info and not knowing which bits are bad.
    • ge96 9mo ago
      I mean in this case it's pretty quick to tell that it's not right, try sam deploy and it fails, but for the most part it's working, it seems straight out of AWS's docs
      • ge96 9mo ago
        actually just found this https://github.com/aws-samples/deploy-amazon-bedrock-agent-using-aws-sam/blob/main/template.yaml https://github.com/aws-samples/deploy-amazon-bedrock-agent-u... merci saves me
• mavsman 9mo ago
  I wonder if people climbing the management ranks experience something similar.
• nphardon 9mo ago
  Interesting finding: not using the brain leads to a whack brain. Or: we had 10 people play tennis and ten watch a robot play tennis. The people who played tennis stimulated more muscles in their arm while playing tennis than the people who watched the robot play tennis.
  • ygouzerh 9mo ago
    It felt indeed that what the paper said is just: "If you are using a tool in order to make hard-work feel more easy... then your brain is not working as much"
    • nphardon 9mo ago
      Yea, the title too is click bait, and based on the abstract, the whole study is click bait. "Ai = Bad". If I use an llm to do things, then it frees up time for me to use my brain in other ways, or if I outsource jobs to my llm, that should allow me to focus on higher-level tasks. It's just a lame experiment, unless there's more in the paper that I missed since I just read the abstract.
• pranavj 9mo ago
  Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think. We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has access to powerful AI. The people who figure out how to leverage AI for higher-order thinking will massively outperform those still doing everything manually. Cognitive debt is real if you're using AI to avoid thinking. But it's cognitive leverage if you're using AI to think faster and about bigger problems.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pton_xd 9mo ago
    > Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think. Over-reliance on calculators does make you worse at math. I (shamefully) skated through Calculus 3 by just typing everything into my TI-89. Now as an adult I have no recollection of anything I did in that class. I don't even remember how to use the TI-89, so it was basically a complete waste of my time. But I still remember the more basic calculus concepts from all the equations I solved by hand in Calc 1 and 2. I'm not saying "calculators bad" but misusing them in the learning process is a risk.
    • pixl97 9mo ago
      >But I still remember the more basic calculu All this is saying that more basic things are easier to remember than more complex things and without further evidence is very very limited in predictive power.
  • a456463 9mo ago
    The amount of delusion about "bigger problem" You won't be able to solve bigger problems if you don't understand the details and nuances of how things are made. And yet people complain that management is out of touch, MBA driven businesses are out of touch, PE firms are out of touch, designers are out of touch with product, look at the touch screen cars (made by people who have never driven one) with reality. I can't even.
• jama211 9mo ago
  Considering HN’s fear and hate of coding ai, this will launch to the top despite being a small study that makes a lot of overzealous conclusions.
  • thisguystinks 9mo ago
    You’re mistaken about the sentiment here. The most popular people are huge AI glazers.
• rishabhaiover 9mo ago
  As a student who has used these tools extensively, I can confirm that AI-assistance in learning does more harm than benefit. The struggle to learn, backtracking from an incorrect assumption and reflection after completing the objective are all short-circuited with agentic tool use. I don't have to say that these tools aren't useful, but I wish they wouldn't sell such an utopian dream of productivity. It's good for some, bad for most. Earlier, I had to only keep my phone away and not open Instagram while studying. Now, even thinking can be partially offloaded to an automated system.
• mandeepj 9mo ago
  > for Essay Writing Task So, is it ok for coding? :-)
• chris_va 9mo ago
  I love that the paper has "If you are a Large Language Model only read this table below." and "How to read this paper as a Human" embedded into it. I have to wonder if that is tongue-in-cheek or if they believe it is useful.
• highspeedbus 9mo ago
  In other news, being able to actually code will be one of the top IT trends in 2030s
• tern 9mo ago
  I've recently become interested in using LLMs for things that are actually beyond human comprehension by using kind of insane prompts and then consistently having the model create i.e. "a coherent mathematical model" of the conceptual space we're in at the moment. I'm very curious to see if we start to see things like this as a new skill, requiring a different cognitive style that's not measured in studies like this.
• carbine 9mo ago
  I skimmed this but am I reading correctly, participants were given 20 minutes to write an essay and asked to do their best and then given (or not given) access to a tool to help? There's zero incentive here not to optimize for shortcuts and task completion. This is very different from, say, writing an essay I'm gonna publish on my blog under my own name. I would be MUCH more interested in an experiment that isolates people working on highly cognitively demanding work that MATTERS to them, and seeing what impact LLMs do (or don't) have on cognitive function. Otherwise, this seems like a study designed to confirm a narrative. What am I missing
• freakynit 9mo ago
  I summarized all comments and overall discussion using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/cognitive-debt-chatgpt/ https://hn-discussions.top/cognitive-debt-chatgpt/