The other day I was doing some programming without an LSP, and I felt lost without it. I was very familiar with the APIs I was using, but I couldn't remember the method names off the top of my head, so I had to reference docs extensively. I am reliant on LSP-powered tab completions to be productive, and my "memorizing API methods" skill has atrophied. But I'm not worried about this having some kind of impact on my brain health because not having to memorize API methods leaves more room for other things.

It's possible some people offload too much to LLMs but personally, my brain is still doing a lot of work even when I'm "vibecoding".

Ironically this is one of my main use cases for LLMs

“Can you give me an example of how to read a video file using the Win32 API like it’s 2004?” - me trying to diagnose a windows game crashing under wine

Exactly. I feel this is the strongest use case. I can get personalized digests of documentation for exactly what I'm building.

On the other hand, there's people that generate tokens to feed into a token generator that generates tokens which feeds its tokens to two other token generators which both use the tokens to generate two different categories of tokens for different tasks so that their tokens can be used by a "manager" token generator which generates tokens to...

And so on. It's all so absurd.

Unsurprising people complain.

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why so few people do it" — attrib Henry Ford

Now we have tools that can appear to automate your thinking for you. (They don't really think, but they do appear to, so...)

“Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats. They can do it, but they prefer not to.” - Kahneman

I read that as implied.

AI will totally rot our brains, just like television, video games, and the internet all did before.

Do you feel that television, video games and the internet had a negligible impact on our culture?

This but unironically.