> AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy

Based on my experience, I think this will prove more true than not in the long run, unfortunately.

Professionally, I see people largely falling into two camps: those that augment their reasoning with AI, and those that replace their reasoning with AI. I’m not too worried about the former, it’s the latter for whom I’m worried.

My mom is a (US public school) high school teacher, and she vents to me about the number of students who just take “Google AI overview” as an absolute source of truth. Maybe it’s just the new “you can’t cite Wikipedia”, but she feels that since the pandemic, there’s a notable decline in the critical thinking skills of children coming through her classes.

We have a whole generation (or two) of kids that have grown up being told what to like, hate, believe, etc. by influencers and anonymous people on the internet. They’d already outsourced their reasoning before LLMs were a thing. Most of them don’t appear to be ready to constructively engage with a system that is designed to make them believe they are getting what they want with dubious quality.