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Comment by estebarb | Hacker News Reader

This will cause cognitive debt anyway. As mentioned in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21972v1: "When students rely on these outputs as a substitute for their own reasoning or critical engagement, the learning process is fundamentally compromised. Genuine learning requires the active construction of meaning, integration of knowledge, and reflective engagement with content. These processes cannot occur through passive consumption of syntactically correct but semantically hollow responses. Without this deeper cognitive work, learners risk mistaking linguistic fluency for understanding, thereby undermining the very goals of education".

Personally, I don't think we will ever be able to reconcile using LLMs and cognitive debt. Even before LLMs we were aware if it: we knew people moving to managerial/PM roles eventually get their coding skills rusted. Well, now we are all in those managerial roles...

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Its weird how absolutely desperate we are to avoid humans actually using their brains at any step of the coding process. I don't know if we just need to tell people that its fine to need to think about things, and that its actively healthy to do so. Learning is good for you, and no chatgpt isn't good enough to avoid using your meat

If you don't engage your brain, it'll rot. That's far more important in the long term than a 5% productivity boost or something. I have no idea why you'd trade off your entire technical development and skillset training, for the most short term gains, it doesn't even theoretically make sense if you care about long term productivity

In a way it's not so different from learning in school. There were definitely times I read a textbook for a programming or other CS course and reused some example code or whatever to solve homework problems.

I think the helpful part is taking something that already exists, learning how it works, and rewriting it yourself to internalize it.

Again as usual the more important thing is that you know what you're using otherwise it's just copying.

It is different from before. The programmers are used to read the code of smart or creative people, or the code of knolled people working for years to solve a specific problem, and within this process they analyze and learn to improve, thanks to this self-learning path, eureka moments included. This process includes to search (to read the voice of different perspectives and knowledges, to learn to use critical thinking).

Now is being proposed to read LLMs' slope and unrevised code constructed from statistics as the way to learn? This is a big mistake. IMHO.

Perhaps typing the code by hand means you are more deliberate and less likely to have the LLM produce thousands of lines of diarrhea.

What do you think would be the effect on people that already have the skills and abilities. The LLM would build these systems using the skills that are largely understood by the programmer but piece them in new ways suitable for the system. This could lead to new enmergent behaviors that are not understood by the programmer.

I still think that you can build this model in your head even with LLM's but I'm not sure neither one way or the other.

There's always some component of a skill that is not merely knowing something but practising something seemingly procedurally. Even if I understand integration well and have done it thousands of times, if I don't continually practise it from scratch, I begin to forget tiny bits and pieces and that accumulates to an eventually lack of understanding. So it is true for all mental tasks. There really isn't such a thing as understanding something completely without working it out by hand, from scratch. AI exacerbates a lack of understanding in this regard, although admittedly layers of abstraction in the coding realm already do that to some extent...

To repeat their last two sentences:

> Even before LLMs we were aware if it: we knew people moving to managerial/PM roles eventually get their coding skills rusted. Well, now we are all in those managerial roles...

It's simple enough: If you don't use it, you lose it.

The more you have, the more there is to lose and the longer it may take. But skills and knowledge fade, just as easily as fitness, or a tan.

It's an insidious rule too. Insidious in the sense that you may not realise you're not exercising a skill. You may think that your just doing it slightly differently, but you will adapt. In whatever way you made your life easier, that's where you'll pay, in strength, fluency, depth, whatever.

I don't know how much I agree, I've been in and out coding for different periods of my life.

At each point few days of practice brought me back where I was.

A few days multiplied by the number of skills I once had translates to well over two months of lost time.

The key is, as you said, practice. I think it's fine to use AI to write code for you, as long as you occasionally force yourself to write code manually. Not only does it help you retain your skills, but it feels more satisfying than prompting, even if arduous.

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