I recently ended up having a multiple hour long conversation with a friend of mine about the potential impact of LLMs and similar tools, which I then made into a blog post: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-artisans-and-brainrot
Basically, if you use agentic tools (not just to look things up or get surface level answers, but write your code for you), then it's quite likely that your brain no longer does as much heavy lifting as it would have before, nor does anything you do to solve the issues you're working with have much staying power.
Over time, this will decrease our cognitive capabilities in regards to specific things, very much how the same has largely happened with language syntax knowledge thanks to various IDEs and language servers, auto-complete and so on, you no longer need to memorize as much, so you don't.
While outsourcing some of that doesn't seem too bad, it's hard to tell what will happen to our critical thinking skills in the long term, since we're not just getting rid of some technical implementation details, but making the tool do a lot of thinking for us. All while screwing over those who don't use these tools, because they have to deal with the full friction of solving the problems.
Basically, if you use agentic tools (not just to look things up or get surface level answers, but write your code for you), then it's quite likely that your brain no longer does as much heavy lifting as it would have before, nor does anything you do to solve the issues you're working with have much staying power.
Over time, this will decrease our cognitive capabilities in regards to specific things, very much how the same has largely happened with language syntax knowledge thanks to various IDEs and language servers, auto-complete and so on, you no longer need to memorize as much, so you don't.
While outsourcing some of that doesn't seem too bad, it's hard to tell what will happen to our critical thinking skills in the long term, since we're not just getting rid of some technical implementation details, but making the tool do a lot of thinking for us. All while screwing over those who don't use these tools, because they have to deal with the full friction of solving the problems.