Tell HN: Man, AI is killing my brain
I was among the last to resist, but then I was given a subtle hint that if I won't "improve my productivity and be on par with my colleagues" my work will be at risk. So I started to use Claude Code about a year ago. At first, I'd give it small tasks, review every line it wrote, opened a proper PR, review again, ask questions, ask it to fix stuff I don't like. But I saw that my colleagues were shipping more, and so I started to ease on my reviews. At first, I would push small features straight to main. But my colleagues were shipping 10x more than me, and I need my job, so I started to push more and rely more on AI. As the agent was doing its work, sometimes 20-30 minutes, I would mindlessly scroll social media, something I tried to avoid for a very long time. But then I saw that my peers are using work trees, running multiple agents. So I started to do the same. Now, instead of mindlessly scrolling, I was launching 4-5 agents, juggling between their output. At some point, I was no longer having mental capacity to understand so much context, so I just started to chose the "Recommended" suggestion by Claude. I no longer know the code, or how things work. If there is a bug, I just copy the user complaint / bug description into Claude and let it figure it out. The good/bad part is that it seems to work. And I'm afraid what's next. Almost one year later and I'm no longer sure I can write code any more. Hell, I'm even struggling to write this post because AI is very good at understanding wrongly spelled words, doesn't care about punctuation or capital letters. Every single thing that made me think, was taken away from me. I no longer have brain ability to research for stuff, I just let AI do it. "Well, just do it yourself", "write code by hand" - I heard you scream from your chairs. I wish I could, but after 10 hours and 15 parallel agents, I no longer have the brain capacity to do anything. "Then change your job" you object, and I hear you, but every interviewer I talk to either asks me "please tell me how you use AI in day to day work" or simply states "we like to move fast, so we use AI as much as possible". I feel like a mindless blob, floating around, paying mortgage, trying to survive, while my brain is being destroyed. I never did drugs, but I think this is how it might feel. No question. Not asking for advice. Just sharing my misery.
Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
missingpackage
Feel the same. Except that for me it's not "after 10 hours...I no longer have the brain capacity"...it's more like "it doesn't really matter anymore if I can write code or not. It means nothing". Quite sad, indeed.
chistev
I can't prove it, but I think AI is causing me brain damage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424762 AI atrophies the brain. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. You know the solution. I wrote about this on my blog - How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Making Us Dumber https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...
MarkusQ
I find lots of things are having that effect on people lately. We used to joke about "drinking from the fire hose" but these days it feels like we're heading towards sun bathing in the solar flare. I know you didn't ask for advice, but I've found that sitting down with a physical book helps. Also listening to music with your eyes closed, walking with no headphones, and working with your hands.
spottedmarley
I know exactly what you're talking about. I was lucky enough to have retired from coding as a career before I ever started using Claude Code. Now I write more code than I ever did but I'm less of a coder than I ever have been too. I'm still having fun, it's just a new abstraction level above the coding, it has it's own skills and fun if you really just love problem solving. (and endless tweaking/debugging)
dkowalski
I feel the same sometimes. Then I look at it as handing it off to an intern to do the preliminary work. As long as I actually look at it sanity sake then I'm still on the loop. That opens doors for more tasks. If I want to research I can and it doesn't mean I'm dumb because I offloaded. It just means I delegated and had time for stuff I cared to do.
curuinor
It's like the progression from manual labor as a society to mass automation of everything physical. Even construction workers have to go to the gym. You'll have to do gym things with the mind, too, now. But gym things are not actually manual labor - the task is to find something you can do reliably that helps, rather than get productive things done.
dpoloncsak
I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, and I'm not a professional, but it seems more like you're dealing with self-identity and depression issues than 'AI brain drain' (Which I do not mean to discredit). The last paragraph atleast rung pretty true to me, who does deal with such issues. It's the lack of motivation. Why even bother doing something by hand when an LLM can get me 90% of what I want in a few minutes, without much work from me? What value can I provide to this project that Claude cannot? But even in the age of 3D-Printers and such, people still wood-work and metal-smith and make models. We have Suno but (most) artists are still writing music by hand, out of passion of the craft. I'd suggest just trying to find something you're passionate about, and work on that. Maybe it's not even programming-related. Or I'm way off-base, just trying to draw parallels to myself. Feel free to dismiss this
cjoh
Reminds me of this from 15 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774
polotics
I find that actually asking the LLM what they've done and why, and pointing out everything that's not quite right, is a good way to avoid that kind of overload. if you're actually managing to have fifteen simultaneous work trees all churning with agents, and all adding real value, on properly abstracted code not mindless copy-pasta or data filling, that is kind of a humble brag anyway, so write a blog post about it!
mzajc
"Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the [Whispering Earring] wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action." https://croissanthology.com/earring
brador
It energises me. Finally my ADHD brain has something faster than it to play with endlessly. Everything I make is now a glorious speedrun.
sph
> I was among the last to resist As someone that is actually resisting the madness, I come to these threads with a feeling of "I told you so" and pretty soon it turns into sadness for my fellow engineers, my fellow humans. I'm sorry you are going through this, likely there is no good answer because we're at the forefront of this nascent revolution, and empathy is hard to come by; I have tried to have serious discussions about the psychological impacts of AI and they get overwhelmed by maximalists and the sociopaths that are unable to see the ramifications of this thing and just care about how many commits they have pushed today. Get ready for the canned response of "I'm having fun!" to someone that is apparently dealing with psychological pain. Here's the only important thing that you will likely ignore because a paycheck is a paycheck: your health is your most important resource. If a thing is dangerous to your physiology, stop doing that, and rearrange your life around this new insight. Literally nothing else should matter above your health. You're not the first to voice these concerns, but they are still not taken seriously and it's terrifying how willing we are to hide our heads in the sand.
othmanosx
Reviewing the code is that hard part, but what makes it stressful is GitHub’s poor support for a good PR review experience, I ended up building my own solution ( https://pyor.review ) to make reviewing the code a lot less stressful.