AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline.
No. AI is simply too recent and evolves too quickly to be demonstrably anything.
The studies you refer to are mostly flawed, and most importantly not about software engineering, where I assure you the problem solving part is not diminished, simply shifted. Don’t let the memes that show people type “just do your best bro” into claude code influence you, they are just memes :)
I can think of plenty of tools that will do something for you even if you understand nothing about the tool, how it works, or the domains it is helfpul with.
I can plug a drill in a socket, put a random bit on and drill a hole without any knowledge of how a drill is supposed to work. But my hole won’t be straight, will be too deep ir too shallow, too large or too small, and I might have drilled straight into a pipe. I don’t understand how drilling works, I still drilled, but the outcome is shit.
I can mix a bunch of flour, eggs, sugar and chocolate in a bowl, then put it in an oven at max temperature on a random heat method and wait half a day. I’ll have a bunch of coal, not a cake. I used an oven without any idra how an oven works, it did something for me. It’s shit, but it did something for me.
Anyone can put the key in a car and start pressing random pedals to figure out how it works. Eventually anyone will get it… If you’re not dead before then or you didn’t total your car. Without understanding anything about a car, I did manage to move it and go somewhere. But I damaged some things in the way.
I could go on and on with as many tools as you want. But I doubt you’ll keep reading.
LLMs in software development are the same: If you understand how to steer it, if you understand software engineering, it will have fantastic results. If you don’t, it will have shit results. The only difference is that it is much harder to understand the insides of how an LLM model works, as that is another specialty. But just like you don’t need to understand how an oven actually works to use it, you don’t need to understand how an LLM actually works to use it.
Edit: Another great example is a camera. Anyone can take a picture, but without a good understanding of photography, most people’s pictures will be shit. And the vast majority of users do not understand and do not hace the knowledge to understand how a camera works.
I haven’t studied this in a while and do not work in the field, so this might be incorrect or imprecise.
It is not only impossible to accelerate to the speed of light, it is impossible for anything to have a speed higher than the speed of light.
While it is counter intuitive, even relative speed cannot be higher than the speed of light. If you are on a train going 300 km/h and another train is going the opposite direction at 300 km/h, then that other train, from your perspective, is going at (almost) 600 km/h.
But when we get close to c, things change: if in a referential, you are in a spaceship going at 0.9c, and you observe a photon going at c in the opposite direction, from your perspective, that photon is going at c for you, in the spaceship, and it is also going at c for someone stationary in the referential observing from the outside.
Similarly, If you are in that spaceship, and observe a spaceship going in the opposite direction at 0.9c as well, then you won’t observe them as going 1.8c in your referential, but something close to yet below 1c. I forgot the formula.
Nothing can be faster than light, in any referential.
That’s a dishonest example. The output of an LLM is never a copy of someone else’s work. That’s not how it works.
If you edit a photograph, then yes, it is your work, not as a photographer, but still your work. Even though you didn’t edit the pixels one by one.