LLMs, Human Intelligence and Monoliths
Here are two things that I found interesting this week:
#1 Are LLMs inhibiting human intelligence?
Your brain grows by solving hard problems and struggling with them. That’s the point of neuroplasticity.
For some time, I’ve been worried that my extensive use of LLMs in problem solving challenges inhibits my ability to learn and prevents my skills and knowledge from adapting and improving. Evidence now seems to be emerging about this, indicating that we need to think more about when to use those tools to preserve cognitive ability.
A study I’ve discovered this week states the following:
AI tools, while valuable for supporting performance, may unintentionally hinder deep cognitive processing, retention, and authentic engagement with written material. If users rely heavily on AI tools, they may achieve superficial fluency but fail to internalize the knowledge or feel a sense of ownership over it.
What’s also interesting about this study is that it shows diminishing ownership over LLM-assisted text. I was wondering whether this could extend to development teams. Could teams using AI for coding extensively feel less ownership about it? This would be an interesting research question.
#2 The GitHub Monolith
When watching Gergely Orosz’ interview with GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, one thing stuck out to me: GitHub is still operating mostly on a monolithic system. I would be interested in digging deeper into how they do this reliably at such a scale.
When I teach Microservices I emphasize two main criteria which should make you think about including deployment boundaries: (1) supporting varying load patterns (i.e. part A has to scale at a different rate/frequency than part B) and (2) improving team independence (i.e. teams want to use different technologies and deploy independently from other teams). GitHub seems to have done this by splitting out the Copilot API (which clearly has different load patterns than the main GitHub platform) and GitHub Actions.
Anyway, check out the full interview here: