Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains (404 Media, 5/13/26)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/

Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed.

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.

“We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure—especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same,” a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. “We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...).”

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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.

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Much more at the link.

[hunter]

1. The tech company executives don't care because their brains are already rotten.

The edifice they are building is not structurally sound.

[cachukis]

2. Very troubling. When you lose an edge it becomes

hard to refine.