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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Maybe? I ran across an old pre-LLM project of mine recently, and past me was an asshole and didn't leave a readme for future me. Meanwhile post-LLM projects at least have a readme that the LLM generated for me or my agent to read and pick up context on. Being able to ask an agent what is this repo, what's going on here? Hey just make it do this, instead of toilsomely digging in and doing it tmmyself, seems to say that might not come to pass.

There is, of course, the question of if that's making me dumber. It might be, but there are other brain training things I'm doing outside of that to force my brain to do the thing.

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The fact that you're even saying this it is probably an admission that you do think it's making you dumber. Most people I know, who are honest with themselves, have admitted to me that they feel like it's making them dumber or "zombifying" them. This is also well studied already, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

LLMs are poison for the brain, I'm almost certain of it, at least when used in the way most people are using them. If you drive everywhere because you don't want to walk (but you could), you're obviously going to be physically worse off than if you walked. This is the case with llms, if you have them do all the thinking, planning and action you're going to be cognitively worse off than if you didn't use them.

Socrates thought the same of reading and writing, that it would weaken the memory and isolate people from one another.

1966 saw the peak of calculator protests, where math teachers claimed similar things of calculators.

TBF I suspect both of those cases are true. Just that the benefits ultimately far outweighed the costs.

all of those predictions seem to have come true

Socrates was right, honestly. I would not be surprised if humans are more evolutionarily optimized for that sort of communication and thinking. Maybe socrates noticed that writers/readers vs orators/listeners were indeed generally dumber in the way we consider people riddled with short form social media induced brainrot to also be missing some mental capacity.

Widespread literacy is only a few generations old, arguably I guess. Meanwhile we’ve been speaking to eachother for longer than we’ve been humans. Oral information can be kept longer than written information too it seems. Our oldest kept information is not written down, but in folk stories such as aboriginal tales some tens of thousands of years old.

THe side benefit for certain entities is that, if you are dumber you are easier to control, influence and manipulate.

Now ask yourself.. who does this benefit? Zuckerberg already generates immmense revenues from it.

It's pretty easy to generalize this, but it doesn't match my perception. People who are using llms to do things they could have already done, but faster, probably have atrophying skill sets. People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves. The problems are just much bigger.

The average Joe can easily vibe code apps that took a small startup just a few years ago. If developers are also using AI to build the same simple apps - then yeah. They're not pushing themselves hard enough, and probably not using their brains as much anymore.

This matches my experience as a statistician who used to begrudgingly write bad code when I had to. LLMs have opened up huge new possibilities for me.

No doubt there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on, because I regularly have to correct them from doing stuff that's really dumb based on my expertise within my area of specialization. More than once I've managed to extract >3 orders of magnitude performance gains after asking them to justify why their code was so slow. Probably there's still some stupid stuff in there. But it's better than the code I would have written, and I never could have paid for a proper developer to write it.

My perception is that this guy's response to "I forgot to write a readme" was "I should limit myself to tools that do it for me" instead of instilling discipline about documentation.

"People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves"

hahaha this is a miniscule amount of people.

most people do not care about their job, only to the extent it is a source of income. but they do not care about it anything more than that. and they shouldnt either!

you live in delululand.

I don't see average Joes vibe coding apps that before took a small startup, I see a lot of cheap talk around that idea, but no receipts ... I see some incredibly simple chrome extensions and the such out there, with their api keys hard coded in their client side code lol

This is absolutely spot on.

Ive met many people who say the exact same thing.

The worrying thing is these are people who nominally seem smart - what we are seeing is 'smart' is not what we think/was. Smart is the ability to identify an object which is harmful and a) be disciplined about its use b) become a better person who doesnt need to expose themselves to said object.

I actually I had one fella who was very distressed - pouring out all his stresses to a bot. Then I reminded him the bot is literally designed to tend to his nees - not to his benefit - but to the provider of the good whom will manipulate said user later on. He then immediately deleted his accounts.

Many are not aware of whats going on around them - this is very concerning.

Sometime a wrong and misleading README done more harm than good.

It is not that rare to see LLM waste hours on a wrong path because a misleading line in README. Even worse, they can't learn. Spawn a subagent and it repeat the same error again

Someone on my team started using an LLM to write all his readme files (he used to not write them at all).

So far, 100% of them have been wrong. I read them, my spidey senses think that what it says doesn’t match his style. I look at the code to find the variables the readme mentions doesn’t exist anywhere in the codebase. I then reach out to him about it, where it says it was written by AI and he will go back and write it for real.

He says it’s better than nothing, but agree with you that it does more harm than good. I wasted my time reading slop. I wasted more time validating the slop. I wasted even more time with a conversation about it. Now he’s spending time re-writing something that he could have written faster and better when he was actually writing the code and it was fresh in his mind. Meanwhile, I’m either blocked waiting for him, or I need to spend my time trying to understand the minutiae of his code so I can integrate it into mine.

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