Is AI ruining my brain?

What I do at work affects my whole brain.

A severely under-represented fact. I feel like this is particularly true for me, especially when I'm struggling to solve a problem at work. It's hard to separate that feeling out from the rest of my life, and it frequently bleeds over into frustration or even lack of presence in my daily life. It requires conscious effort for me to "leave work at work"

This has come up before, and yes, there is a lot of potential in my opinion to atrophy parts of your brain when using LLMs. Which also heavily depends on how you use them, as there are different ways to do so. It is one of the ways why I still try to use them as tools outside the process. Something I did comment on before

Where the line is drawn does differ per person. But I think it is good if people stop to think where they draw the line and why. For me it comes down to my ability to be able to judge the LLM output properly. I can only do that when I have an active and maintained knowledge and skill set to do so. The more I let AI generate code for me (or actually written text for that matter) the less I practice those skills myself. The less I practice those skills and the more I lean on the generative part the more likely it will start to go wrong somewhere down the line.

So in my mind there two very distinct ways of using LLMs. Or maybe more accurately there are two sides of a spectrum with a lot of area in between them:

1. The lazy approach where you let the LLM do the heavy lifting. Examples of this include:
   • Providing an LLM with some basic info, what you are looking for and let the LLM do most of the writing for you. It doesn't really matter if it is code or something like an essay.
   • Write a very rough draft, ask the LLM to clean it up and semi blindly use the output as your final result.
2. Using LLMs as a tool external to the process. Examples of this include:
   • Deciphering spaghetti code: LLMs generally are pretty good at picking apart code blocks and generally explaining the functional parts. It can be a good way to get around "wtf is this" bits of legacy code.
   • Code reviews of things you have written. To be frank, half the time the suggestions are trash but at the same time LLMs are also pretty good at spotting some non obvious issues.
   • Using an LLM as a thesaurus to ask for possible alternatives for specific words but decide for yourself which to use.
   • Asking an LLM to review writing but critically go over each point keeping in mind that they might miss the point. Akin to asking random people on the internet for feedback, there might be some good points in there but some of it might be trash.

In my personal, so very much anecdotal, experience the last method still requires people to be very much engaged. But, as I said before, I think a lot of people who start using LLMs sort of drift to the lazy approach very easily. Because it is very convenient and easy to slowly hand over more thinking to an LLM.

The latter I have seen happen all too often around me. An alarming increase of lazy non critical use of LLM tools by people who should know better. People who might have been a bit slower before but delivered excellent results now have started delivering trash. Code spanning dozens of line trying to solve something that should only take one line. Code that completely ignores and conventions or design paradigms put in place. Code that goes directly against security practices. Suddenly downgraded dependency versions (because the models training data doesn't include the latest version).

So to me, it very much makes sense to keep writing myself. Both text like comments here, documentation or mails as well as code. And again, that doesn't mean I will not use LLMs during that process. But I very much make an active effort to apply them as tools externally to the process and actively engage with them in ways that doesn't hand me answers over on a silver platter.

It is a continuous effort for me to make sure to use these as tools and not as generative machines. Because my brain, my skills are my most valuable asset here and regardless of what the future will bring I strongly believe I will benefit from trying to keep it sharp.

I only recently bought an llm sub for personal use. Many of my personal projects are exploring systems I’m interested in learning, so it’s not really about the end product. However, it’s very seductive when I get stuck to immediately reach for an llm.

Knowing that an llm can fix my problem and write the entire program in 30 mins is so damn tempting. That’s how it’s changing my brain and I hate it. Not only is it allowing me to work on projects I never would have been able to tackle but it’s also taking away the satisfaction of going from red to green lights.