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

Howdy folks, as some of y'all are aware, I carry an Android phone - specifically a Oneplus 11 on Lineage.

This whole 'Android dev lockdown / verification' situation irks me. I don't like the play store, I see it as a den of malware and villainy, only meant to peddle corporate spyware, invasive Ai agents, tracking systems and ads into our lives.

So I am faced with a dilemma, but as a millennial, I remember Y2K. The world didn't end just because it suddenly went from 1999 to 2000, and so the world won't end just because September is coming, then August, and so forth.

There will be holdouts, there will be devs who 'dgaf', who continue putting out apks for 'unverified' Android. Hell, you'll likely have two years of boredom and tossing it about in your mind before you actually have to do anything about it to function in society.

So, where do I sit? I'm in the holdout camp in the short term. I have a plan for the bigger picture that will basically treat a post-2026 cellphone like a piece of radioactive material that's only purpose is to beam a tetherable wifi connection, and only be used for calls and ordering pizza whenever it's rarely let out of its Faraday bag or vaccum-sealed lead box.

Thanks to Google, Apple and Microslop, We live in a caustic world that hates and despises us, but that's all well and good.

So do they.

#cellphones #android #google #unverified #verification

Hey T-Mobile, fuck you.

“""
We are going to create—and we think we have every right to do so—an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans.
...
A representative for T-Mobile did not comment on whether these content blocks violate any of its policies.
"""

Renting your bandwidth to bigots makes you a bigot.

@KrissyKat https://hoosier.social/@KrissyKat/116638354698049262

#CellPhones #TMobile #LGBTQ+ #Trans