I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.
The funny thing is, maybe not noticing one can be the actual sign of it :)
The same weight feeling heavier is a sign that your muscles are weaker :)
There's many areas in life were we look back a few decades and think "people use to do it that awkwardly?" And yet results were better. I think the process of removing friction have just served to destroy our ability to concentrate and tolerate difficulty.
Not getting that quick dopamine hit the LLMs give you..
Some say you can re-train your system to get back the dopamine hits you used to get from other things, like the enjoyment of the "old fashioned" manual coding and math. Getting there is hard work. And YMMV.
I had the most Russian of Russian bosses when I was in college. My first day on the job he so eloquently stated, "I am not your mother. Do not come to me with problems. Come to me with solutions. I want to know what you tried and what did not work."
His advice has served me well in many areas of life too. I try my best to treat LLMs no differently for domains I care about (not one-off little questions here and there).
Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to set that up as I envisioned it, for the time being.
And I'm just afraid this is what cognitive decline feels like from inside the deteriorating mind.
These are correlated - it just hasn’t happened in a large enough amount for you to have clearly noticed it yet.
I use an agent to generate a first-pass attempt, and then (deadlines willing), I manually read every line at least once so I understand what the code actually does.
Then I manually fix the inevitable slop that is mixed in with the good stuff, and only once the code is up to my personal standards do I send it.
This probably reduces my “AI performance boost” to 30-50% instead of the huge gains reported by others. But I retain the ability to reason about the codebase and use AI much more precisely when I’m trying to troubleshoot production outages or subtle bugs — something I notice the rest of my team struggles with, since adopting “agentic workflows” everywhere.
I think actively working to retain some cognitive flexibility and “muscle memory” around coding tasks is going to be rather advantageous in the long run.