In college (~5 years ago) I had to write a move-data-from-A-to-B pipeline¹ for a club. I had a simple version ready in ~1hour but it looked bad and slow. So I stayed up the whole night for the next 6 hours finding about weird MongoDB commands, discovering transactions from first principles², Node.js memory management. I commented it by hand and perfected the code. I don't know if I still have that code but it's a memory I often go back to.

I recently tried to write an elevator simulator (harder than I thought it would be) entirely on my own. I wrote the tests as a markdown spec and used an LLM to actually convert them to tests according to my interface. That was definitely a little gratifying, but not even close to what I used to feel. Of course, fully blaming LLMs is not really fair. There's also Life™ but LLMs definitely helped this soft-atrophy.

I simultaneously feel called out and encouraged by the post. The gym analogy feels apt. I guess I need to work on my recovery as well as hit a different gym which isn't named software.

1: I didn't know it was called ETL back then

2: I'm one of those weirdos who learnt a NoSQL DB first

OK, find me an employer who does not require me to work 5x more and 5x faster than before and we'll not feel the cognitive decline by being able to, you know, actually stop and ingest the info with our brains, at our own pace, and forming lasting memories and lasting patterns in our brains.

Articles like these are just screaming into the void. A lot of us get the problem just fine, dude; find me a job with the pre-AI ethics and requirements and then we are talking.

If not, then it comes across as empty virtue-signaling. We're WAY beyond the raising-awareness phase. Who are you preaching to? You think the people who believe that they can now get 10x (or more) value from us + the agents are going to suddenly stop? How does the whole thing go in your head?