Hypothesis:

LLMs are driving us to only use surface-level thinking, and this will lead to a decline in all future opportunities.

Editorial:

I’m worried about how I think, specifically the “depth” of my thinking. I don’t track how “deep” I think regularly, nor do I have any objective tools that I could use for metrics. The only tool I have is my gut, which is more-or-less unreliable, but for the lack of tools, I’ll use it.

My gut tells me I haven’t been thinking deeply lately (weeks? months? Unfortunately, there isn’t a timeline my gut keeps track of, only stimulus). I was a currmugden around LLMs when they first came out, pushing them away until 8 or so months ago. After I got the hang of prompting well enough to not want to pull my hair out, I slowly began to fall victim to my biology and realized after a few weeks I was turning towards LLMs to replace my thinking. I found myself:

  • Prompting the LLM first thing when a question came to mind for any problem I was working on, rather than engaging mentally with it myself. Only after reading the response from the LLM would I engage, and by then I more often than not took the LLM response at face level and went with it.
  • Using my google-fu skills less and less, to the point where I just stopped googling and researching problems to find answers on the inter-webs.
  • Not really thinking about a problem at first and instead just prompting the LLM to take a first pass.

Thank the great space turtle in the sky for my gut, because after awhile I began to feel (for lack of a better phrase) gross. My gut was signaling to me with a blinking red light, “Something’s wrong here…”.

Do you find yourself feeling this way?

Research papers have been published supporting LLM usage leads to degradation of mental faculties, i.e., cognitive decline. In an industry like software engineering, I believe we can’t afford this. All other factors in a vacuum, mental acuity is a main weapon in the daily grind of writing and maintaining software.

So here’s how I am fighting back. And yes, I use the word “fighting” because it sure feels like we’re at war with our own biology. It’s something we can’t change, so we have to mitigate it as much as possible, always. I serendipitously stumbled across Cal Newport’s podcast episode around cognitive fitness. Him being a computer scientist, a realist around LLMS and a long-known advocate of “deep work” (I think he coined this term?), he has some clout here. It’s like it showed up right when I needed it. Here are his five actions you can do to fight brain rot:

  • Read every day
  • Write every day
  • Stay (the fuck) away from your phone when you’re home by plugging it in to charge or leaving it in another room
  • Take thinking walks where you can self-reflect and focus internally, not use your phone or an external device
  • Learn/Do a hard activity that forces you to focus but also has clear rewards based on your investment

Today is day one for me. This post satisfies the “write” portion of my cognitive fitness routine for today. Assuming I stick with this routine (and that’s a separate conversation around discipline), I wonder if I’ll do a follow-up post some time from now; it could satisfy the “write” of that day if it comes (haha).

Good luck fighting brain rot, fellow reader and kindred spirit. May your mind be free of rot and sharp as iron. Cheers.