I’ve been interviewing software engineers for many years, and this was the first year the “AI natives” started graduating and applying for jobs.

Never had such a high rate of people completely unable to write one line of code in a language that appears on their CV, it’s been about 50% in the last few months where I had to end the interview during the warmup question.

Well, no shit.

My grade 4 teacher let us cheat on multiplication tables which still has me screwed up for doing multiplication and division in my head

It’s important to have these studies, even though the result is predictable. People who want to move toward restricting AI in schools need something more than anecdotes to point to as justification.

When I was in year 12 of high school last year, some students attempted to use ChatGPT to write their practice exams for them. Mind you, these practice exams are the same as proper state mandated exams, where there are to be zero electronics used whatsoever unless it’s a disability aid, but the practice ones are also just that, to practice your skills, not to write it off as some worthless obligation.

There were actually heaps more of these students who entirely used LLMs for their assignments, would be made to rewrite them because it’s AI written, then proceed to have ChatGPT write it again and pass it through a ‘humaniser’ which just made it unreadable. It’s alarming that these people are willing to stop using their mind at all just because some service from half way across the world wrote an essay better than they could before.

The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.

AI is not a substitute for experience. Too many people assume that it can be.

More bullshit grifting from state propagandists.

This kind of phony science is not helping.

Grok is that true?

Fork found in kitchen

Shocked pikachu meme…

“May”

We already have studies outside of AI on how bad not doing the critical thinking for oneself is. It is literally impossible for this to not be detrimental.

In other news, death is inevitable and the sky is blue.

2 things:

1. The article is from Jan-2026;
2. This is the actual article.