Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

Personally, I use AI to learn more about Backend Engineering actually, so it's fine for me. Beside I can also use AI to suggest and it's me verifying the idea so that's a no for me

How much of the thinking is involved in asking the right question, versus coming to the correct answer? I don't have a real answer to that but it does seem to be worth considering.

This is the kind of headline I would expect from one of those news that appear as you progress in cookie clicker.

as a six-figure salary software engineer haver I find that a lot of colleagues take their cushy jobs for granted.

these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes.

why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?

Yes, I think we are . And because of super competition, most of us are trying to make AI (agentic) do the work.

Having a very dangerous AI standoff at work, where people are debating wether or not to use a particular connection pooling / threading strategy to fix a production issue, and everyone is unqualified to answer and is instead arguing what their agent said.

They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation.

No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.

Ironically I just caught myself offloading the thinking about this article to the comment section before I read it

This is a load-bearing title.

The answer to this question is: Politicians, not you!

Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life?

No direct democracy, just people deciding for you. You can choose once every four years. Are we surprised of how easily we delegate decisions? May be AI can do it better

The value of thinking in language is going down, the value of acting on your dreams is going up

You’d lose your ability to interview at a different workplace.

I'd rather hire a clankers these days

I like the colonialism conversation.

I don't think AI causes people to stop thinking. Rather, I think it biases people toward doing what they want to do more, and that bias is what becomes problematic.

In fact, when I use AI, I don't really use it for the things I actually enjoy doing. For example, I like making UI animations, and I don't use AI for that. I also don't use AI when I'm playing games I enjoy. But when I have to make something tedious like a login screen, I use AI. And after I write the code, I just throw the entire codebase at AI to write the documentation.

The problem is that this only lets me think about things I have a taste for.

Having taste and diving deep into it is good. Immersion is great. But on the flip side, you also need to do things that aren't your taste. That's more cognitively healthy. AI prevents that.

In that sense, I think AI's strength is that it creates an environment where you can dive deeper into the areas you like.

But the real question becomes how you use the cognitive surplus that's left after offloading tasks to AI.

I visit Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and USA sites, and honestly, most people, including myself, only have deep thinking about certain topics. Outside of those, we just follow the prevailing opinion.

So I'm not really sure. I don't think using AI makes me stop thinking. I just think it creates a bias that makes my thinking only focus on the parts I want to focus on.

I am reminded of the old Zizek remark about letting two sex toys fuck each other so you and your partner are freed up to go about and do other things.

If you offload any of your thinking to AI, you're offloading too much of your thinking to AI.

Offload your execution, not your thinking.

I liked the ending well said

Honestly, using AI helps me get more done in a day because I can delegate some decision making to it, usually inconsequential stuff.

If you are then yes. See also Am I relying on the recommendation algorithm too much to decide for me on <platform>

@grok is this true?

> Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent.

...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.

Yes.

Yes that seems pretty clear. We also need quick adaptation in school and university to avoid cheating. Back to closed book exams I guess, home projects not counting for the final score. It sucks but I don´t see how you can´t avoid removing technology for evaluation. Sure people can use AI to boost their ability to get better results but they will have to prove it the old way with no assisted help and people watching them during exams.

LLMs are strongly mean reverting in their decision making, so heavy users are likely to be readily identified by their unadventurous conformism much as generated media is identified now.

I’ve found that when I ask AI to do something for me that I know how to do myself - but would rather not spend the time doing - there is a not insignificant chance that the AI will return a subpar result, which I can usually tell rather quickly. Either by glancing at the code, or trying to compile it and getting an error.

This happens frequently enough that it creates a real disincentive for me to use AI for anything that I already know how to do - and use it exclusively for things I don’t know how to do.

It’s deeply frustrating to realize you just wasted 20 minutes posting error messages into Claude when you could’ve just locked in and written it yourself.

Yes

Who is "we"? Is there a mouse in your pocket?

Absolutely. Calculators made us lazy. GPS made us dumb. LLMs are turning us into idiots. Because idiots have the power to damage themselves and others

"we" no. just allows me to think about the stuff that matters.

and work on things that would usually be out of my element.

if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.

The normal application of Betteridge's law of headlines is "no" but I think this is one of the rare instances where it's "yes."

yes

is the pope catholic?

does a bear shit in the woods?

does rust have the worst community of all time?

Consider the following scenario. You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get? An answer? No, you get bad manners, insults, "you don't know how to ask questions", "RTFM". At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question, which you can't do because you don't know the technology well enough.

Annoyed, you go find a popular programming chatbot, and ask the question. The chatbot will give you answer, no matter how poorly worded or nonsensical your question, and it will do it cheerfully and confidently. It may even tell you how great your question or idea is. Granted, the answer will be worthless, both because the question was poorly worded and because the chatbot is simply spewing statistically probable text, but you won't know. You're a beginner, without experience to know correct from bullshit. You try to use the answer the chatbot gave you, and when it doesn't work, you go back to the chatbot. It will continue to cheerfully answer your questions as long as you have tokens to spend. The chatbot will never give up on trying to help you, it will never be rude, it won't complain.

And people wonder why chatbots are so popular.

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]