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deltax
deltax

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Do AI assistants reduce cognitive load — or accumulate cognitive debt?

AI assistants are increasingly embedded in daily workflows:
coding, writing, reasoning, decision support.

They clearly reduce immediate effort.
But a deeper question remains:

Do they actually reduce cognitive load,
or do they defer it — creating cognitive debt over time?

Recently, Hacker News has seen multiple discussions touching this issue
(e.g. “Your brain on ChatGPT”, governance frameworks, autonomy concerns).
What’s often missing is a non-narrative, formal perspective.

I’ve published a formal, non-adaptive framework on OSF
focused on decision-making, invariants, and cognitive autonomy:

https://osf.io/ub5f4

This is not an opinion piece.
Not pro-AI, not anti-AI.
It’s a structural attempt to reason about cognition under assistance.

I’m especially interested in concrete feedback from people who use AI daily:

  • Have you noticed changes when the tool is absent?
  • Does AI reduce effort sustainably, or postpone it?
  • What practices help preserve autonomy?

Curious to hear real observations, not hype.

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