>even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

The same weight feeling heavier is a sign that your muscles are weaker :)

There's many areas in life were we look back a few decades and think "people use to do it that awkwardly?" And yet results were better. I think the process of removing friction have just served to destroy our ability to concentrate and tolerate difficulty.

“ I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier"”

These are correlated - it just hasn’t happened in a large enough amount for you to have clearly noticed it yet.

> but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

Not getting that quick dopamine hit the LLMs give you..

Some say you can re-train your system to get back the dopamine hits you used to get from other things, like the enjoyment of the "old fashioned" manual coding and math. Getting there is hard work. And YMMV.

>I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se

The funny thing is, maybe not noticing one can be the actual sign of it :)

Absolutely this, I'm the same as you.

And I'm just afraid this is what cognitive decline feels like from inside the deteriorating mind.

LLMs are making me smarter. I have more code to read!

I do a similar version of this, where if I notice a mistake in generated code, I fix it manually (or at least attempt to) instead of telling Claude to fix it.