Software #Developers Say #AI Is Rotting Their Brains

by Emanuel Maiberg, May 13, 2026

Excerpt: "The developers I talked to found AI useful for some tasks. Several developers said that it was good for experimentation, allowing them to quickly prototype an idea or to implement something in a domain they’re unfamiliar with. One developer said it was a good information interface. Specifically, he said, the AI helped him find where on the server a certain request is handled, summarize logs, or find documentation related to code changes.

"The problem all the developers I talked to agreed on is that the more they relied on AI to code, the more the skills they’ve honed for years deteriorated. This is by now a well studied phenomenon sometimes referred to as '#CognitiveDebt' or '#CognitiveAtrophy.' The idea is that people who use AI to automate certain parts of their job lose the ability to do those tasks well, therefore #DeSkilling themselves.

" 'I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the shit out of me. I went to university for this, I've been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code,' the software developer at a small web design firm told me.

" 'It's making me dumber for sure,' the fintech software developer told me. “It's like when we got #cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing ‘thinking’ in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before.'

" 'When I was using it for code generation, I found myself having a lot of trouble building and maintaining a #MentalModel of the code I was working with,' the software engineer at the FAANG told me. 'Another aspect is that I joined late last year and [the company’s] codebase is massive. As a new hire, part of my job is to learn how to navigate the codebase and use the established conventions, but I think the AI push really hampered my ability to do that. '"

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/2vjJm

#AISucks #DumbingUsDown #BrainRot #AIBrainRot #MentalMaps #CriticalThinkingSkills #UseYourBrain #UseItOrLoseIt

Agentic coding shifts developers from builders to orchestrators, risking skill erosion and over-reliance on AI. While efficient, it may degrade problem-solving abilities and deepen vendor lock-in. A powerful abstraction—but not without cognitive cost. #cognitiveatrophy

https://wesearch.press/s/agentic-coding-is-a-trap-13622ee3?utm_source=social&utm_medium=auto&utm_campaign=mastodon

Some rando on the Internet wrote about my likely future: Burnout caused by the “AI” usage of co-workers.

https://ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout

Maybe this will be your future, too. Caving in and using generative “AI” tools is not a healthy alternative:

A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute” to “cognitive atrophy” and shrinking of critical thinking abilities.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling-our-minds/

#genAI #aiburnout #vibecoding #cognitiveAtrophy