Professional Cognitive Surrenderer | unlike.ly

Professional Cognitive Surrenderer

24 May, 2026

I've jokingly changed my LinkedIn title to "Professional Cognitive Surrenderer". It's probably a subconscious attempt to hide my shame and disappointment in myself in plain sight. A sublimation of a growing problem I didn't want to admit I have.

Later in that same week I felt I've hit rock bottom. I was knee deep in a claude-opus-4-7 (or was gpt-5.5-pro? who knows at this point) made plan, staring at a mountain of bullet points, check lists and notes with dread and a sense of complete overwhelm. I realized it's time I come clean with myself with a formal statement:

My name is Lior and I have a problem. I've been (ab)using LLMs to the point I no longer remember how to think for myself.<br>It's embarrassing to admit, especially when my livelihood is dependent on my skills, experience and taste as a veteran software engineer. But I suspect I'm not alone and this is a phenomenon that's silently happening to many, if not most software engineers nowadays.

Using LLMs is like using a seemingly innocuous recreational drug. Supposedly, if you pace yourself and have some boundaries regarding when and how you use it, it might be fine, maybe even great.

But I think its allure and addictiveness is far greater than we currently realize.

After you use it for one small thing here and another one there, you ask yourself the next day: "why not ask it to do the whole thing?". I outsourced this little implementation today, why not have it plan for me the bigger picture tomorrow? Oh it's giving interesting feedback, great!

Before I know it I'm giving it full features with a description asking it to plan for me. Amazing. Look at this intricate plan it spit out after thinking and researching for me. I try to review it, but at this point in time my cognitive abilities aren't as sharp as they used to be. They've been slowly atrophied by my outsourcing my brain to an LLM model many times a day, every day. Before I knew it I've become dependent and depleted. I delegate most tasks to it with ever shrinking pre-processing of my own.

Similar to how we used to remember phone numbers until one day we all kinda stopped since smart phones outsourced that part of our brains. That's fine, who cares about remembering random phone numbers. But with this supposed higher-order thinking black boxes? It's atrophying our critical thinking and problem solving skills. At least mine's.

Before I knew it, I've crossed the threshold. Crossed the line between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender. But I think it's not entirely my fault. I suspect the nature of our brains combined with the nature of LLMs create an inherent problem. It's just so darn easy, available and temping.

I'm going to try to break the habit, to kick the monkey and get back to sobriety and hopefully regaining my atrophied skills. The first step for me is this post. Trying to write (LLM-free, gosh darn it) as a way to form and express my independent thoughts and feelings.

If you feel similarly, here's a list of critical write-ups I found helpful:

Agentic coding is a trap

Claude is not your architect

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Cognitive debt revisited

Cognitive Surrender

Appearing productive in the workplace

Good luck.