I'm pretty radical on this topic but for me cognitive load is good, you are making your neurons work and keep synapses in place where they matter (at least for your job). I totally accept writing down doc or howto to make doing some action in future easier and reduce that cognitive load, but using AI agent IMO is like going to bike in the mountain with an electrical bike.
Yes, you keep seeing the wonderful vistas but you are not really training your legs.
I know how to nail a nail, I've nailed so many nails that I can't remember them all.
My job is to build a house efficiently, not nail nails. Anything that can make me more efficient at it is a net positive.
Now I've saved 2 hours in the framing process by using a nail gun, I have 2 extra hours to do things that need my experience. Maybe spot the contractor using a nail plate in the wrong way or help the apprentice on their hammering technique.
The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains of code, but are instead are sifting through endless corporate slop.
> We might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway.
The trades destroy human bodies over time and lead to awful health outcomes.
Most developers will and should take any opportunity to reduce cognitive load, and will instead spend their limited cognitive abilities on things that matter: family, sport, art, literature, civics.
Very few developers are vocational. If that is you and your job is your identity, then that's good for you. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that's a normal or desirable situation for others.
I'm not sure you're approaching this metaphor the right away. The point is that coding manually is great cognitive exercise which keeps the mind sharp for doing the beautiful stuff.
> The trades destroy human bodies over time and leads to awful health outcomes.
Again, you're maybe being too literal and missing the point. No one is destroying their minds by coding. Exercise is good.
No, I'm challenging the metaphor. Working the trades isn't exercise - it's a grind that wears people out.
> Again, you're maybe being too literal and missing the point. No one is destroying their minds by coding. Exercise is good.
We actually have good evidence that the effects of heavy cognitive load are detrimental to both the brain and mental health. We know that overwork and stress are extremely damaging to both.
So reducing cognitive load in the workplace is an unambiguous good, and protects the brain and mind for the important parts of life, which are not in front of a screen.
I don't think this is fair either, you're comparing "overwork and stress" to "work." It's like saying we have evidence that extreme physical stress is detrimental ergo it's "unambiguously" healthier to drive than to walk.
Maybe you could share your good evidence so we can see if normal coding tasks would fall under the umbrella of overwork and stress?
This is so well-founded that I do not have to provide individual sources - it is the current global accepted reality. I wouldn't provide sources for the effect of CO2 emissions on the climate or gravity, either.
However, the opposite is not true. If you have evidence that routine coding itself improves adult brain health or cognitive ability, please share RCTs or large longitudinal studies showing net cognitive gains under typical workloads.
If your job is just grinding out code in a stressful and soul-crushing manner, the issue lies elsewhere. You will be soon either grinding out prompts to create software you don't even understand anymore or you will be replaced by an agent.
And by no way I'm implying you are part of the issue.
The vast majority of developers are in or near this category. Most software developers never write code outside of education or employment and would avoid doing so if an AI provided the opportunity. Any opportunity to reduce cognitive load is welcome
I think you don't recognise how much of an outlier you are in believing that your work improves your cognitive abilities.
It's clear that you're more interested in "winning" than actually have a reasonable discussion so goodbye. I've had less frustrating exchanges with leprechauns.
I need to add a FooController to an existing application, to store FooModels to the database. The controller needs the basic CRUD endpoints, etc.
I can spend a day doing it (crushing my soul) or I can just tell any Agentic LLM to do it and no something that doesn't crush my soul, like talk with the customer about how the FooModels will be used after storing.
"But it'll produce bad code!"
No it doesn't. It knows _exactly_ how to do a basic CRUD HTTP API controller in C#. It's not an art form, it's just rote typing and adding Attributes to functions.
Because it's an Agentic LLM, it'll go look at another controller and copy its structure (which is not standard globally, but this project has specific static attributes in every call).
Then I review the code, maybe add a few comments for actual humans, commit and push.
My soul remains uncrushed, client is happy when I delivered the feature on time and I have half the day off for other smaller tasks that would become technical debt otherwise.
And yet, you now want me to source individual studies on those effects in a HN thread? Yes, in this instance you are approaching flat-earth/climate-change-denial levels of discourse. Reducing cognitive load is an unambiguous good.
If you think routine coding itself improves brain health or cognitive ability, produce the studies showing as you demanded from me, because that is a controversial claim. Or you can crash out of the conversation.
I can’t write this without feeling preachy, and I apologize for that. But I keep reading a profound lack of agency in comments like these.
Like no mechanic gets pleasure from an oil change or tire rotation. They’d rather figure out an issue with an old V8
But they do it because that’s a part of the job.
Some people just write code for 8 hours, go home and never think about it on their free time.
This is a very optimistic take. If you are in the type of company that just gives you boring code and tasks, you will required to use the other half-day to work on some other boring feature. This will not give us time to pay tech debt. Maybe it will do in the beginning when using AI agents has not been institutionalized yet, but once it has, you will be asked to churn out more "features"