I think folks ITT are trivializing the issue here. Many keep drawing parallels to LLMs being akin to the loom or calculator. That seems intellectually dishonest to me. Those tools were not anthropomorphized interfaces, nor were they instant gratification. To do significant things with a calculator, you still had to know maths, order of operations, formulas, etc. We didn't lose mathematicians as a result of the calculator, nor did the calculator play with our emotions.
I have linked this elsewhere in this thread, but the studies on this matter suggest a worse outcome than just losing hand crafted or "artisanal" software: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721
> These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
> We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own.
This issue is not that we are losing the ability to write good software by hand. It is possible we are losing our internal tools to learn new things by circumventing a necessary part of the process required by our biology.
I have linked this elsewhere in this thread, but the studies on this matter suggest a worse outcome than just losing hand crafted or "artisanal" software: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721
> These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
> We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own.
This issue is not that we are losing the ability to write good software by hand. It is possible we are losing our internal tools to learn new things by circumventing a necessary part of the process required by our biology.