Obviously the discussion here is mostly about writing code. In that domain, I’m always of two minds on this sort of thing. Although I think everyone would agree that material cognitive decline is bad, I also think we have to be precise with what that means.

During university, for an exam in a graduate databases course, I had to manually calculate the number of operations for a query, down to the ones place. We were given an E-R diagram, the schema, and the query. So we had to act as the query planner - build out the B+ tree, check what was most efficient, and do it.

This is by all means a pointless endeavor - no one has had to do this by hand in literally decades. It was also among the hardest cognitive tasks I've ever had to do. After being one of two people to complete the exam in the three allotted hours, I sat outside the lecture hall on a bench for a little while because I though I might faint if I went any further.

I’m beginning to feel the same about writing code by hand. If I can design systems that are useful, performant, and largely maintainable, but the code is written by an LLM, is this harmful? It feels that I spend more time thinking about what problems need to be solved and how best to solve them, instead of writing idiomatic typescript. It’d be hard to convince me that’s a bad thing.