LLMs killed my will to do stuff

I was 12, in some hotel room in italy, trying to make a discord bot work. My dad helped me smuggle in a raspberry pi and keyboard. I unplugged the tv, booted up the board, followed some random ass tutorial for javascript. The code was a mess, nothing worked right. I spent hours reading error messages I didn't understand, copying stack overflow answers I understood even less, and painfully slowly making progress. By the end of the weekend, I had something functional. It was a complete catastrophe (each command's event listener was a separate process), but hey, it was mine!

2026. I'm lying in bed with my laptop, trying to figure out what to build next. Nothing comes to my mind, so I just open mistral and ask for project ideas. I iterate over and over again. Nothing clicks. I give up.

A few days later, I finally find something worth building. I start scaffolding it out by hand, making decent progress. Then I hit a wall: some bug I can't immediately solve, or a feature that needs research. First instinct? Open the llm, ask it to fix the problem, let it write the solution.

I catch myself doing this even when I know I shouldn't, even when I know that figuring it out myself is the point. And look, I was always kind of a lazy guy: school never pushed me hard, I could get through with minimal effort, university is the same. I grew up in this "get rewarded for doing barely anything, if not nothing" environment, and it warped how I approach everything, including programming. Long-term effort feels pointless when shortcuts have always worked.

But I don't think llms created this problem in me, they just made it much worse.

And maybe it's because they feel like a conversation: it responds, adapts, seems to understand context. It's really easy to forget you're talking to statistics and matrix multiplication. Your brain treats it like asking a friend instead of looking something up, feels less like cheating, more like collaboration, even when you know it's not.

I think my generation is lucky, we learned [to code] before you could just ask an ai to do it. We had to sit with confusion, read documentation (who writes docs anyways?) or articles that didn't make sense until suddenly it just magically did. We had to earn our understanding through trial and error and frustration. When you can just bypass the struggle entirely, you never build the muscle memory of thinking through problems by yourself.

this is how I feel while writing this but whatever

I see this in myself. I used to be able to sit with a bug/idea for hours, motivated and somewhat focused. Now my attention span has become catastrophic, why bother with something when I can paste it into a chat window and get an answer in seconds?

The fucked up part is that I know this is happening. I can see myself getting worse at the things I care about, yet I still go for the easy solutions anyway. I don't think the answer is to pretend these tools don't exist, but I do think we're not talking/caring enough about what we're losing. maybe I'm overthinking this, but I kinda miss being stuck on something.