Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

“Another developer on a contract working with me at the moment generates massive amounts of code, leaving me with 1000+ lines of pull requests to review and it takes massive amounts of time to do this. This leads to me feeling more tired and burned out than I've ever felt in my entire life. The cognitive overhead of switching between prompting, coding, checking the LLM's output is a massive energy drain. It has not been a productivity booster at all, it feels like a speedrun towards severe mental exhaustion.”

There's a reason why large pull requests are frowned upon. They're harder to review even when the developer knows all the code that is there since they wrote it. Now devs are being asked to review massive pull requests with code that LLMs wrote that may or may not have even been looked at by the developer submitting the pull request. It feels like a recipe for disaster.

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 "cognitive debt” or "cognitive atrophy.” The idea is that people who use AI to automate certain parts of their job lose the ability to do those tasks well, therefore de-skilling themselves.

So now us devs have to continue to keep up with all the changes in tech stack and best practices, but we have to keep the AI from eating at our ability to do the jobs we were trained to do, and well.