Offloading cognition is what one does when they use abstractions that other people made through intense cognition. And it's fine to do that; people can build great things with great abstractions. A woodworker doesn't have to design and construct a tool to make great things with it.
But developing the people [who can build great new abstractions or the people who can build those abstractions into ergonomic tooling] involves a lot of cognitive struggle through which these people learn how to push knowledge forward.
Forming the mental models for how things work takes struggle. Debugging errors in your code forces you to figure out the disconnect between your mental model and reality.
Claude can figure out most errors I show to it much faster than I can, but when we're building something I could build from scratch, I regularly find even Opus 4.7 regularly provides vastly overcomplicated and inferior solutions and I have to redirect it. I assume this is also the case when we're building stuff that's new to me and I just can't recognize all of the overcomplicated suboptimal solutions until I get to testing the behaviors I need to be correct. If I got a tool like this at the start of my career or education, I just don't know how I wouldn't end up completely stunted.
But developing the people [who can build great new abstractions or the people who can build those abstractions into ergonomic tooling] involves a lot of cognitive struggle through which these people learn how to push knowledge forward.
Forming the mental models for how things work takes struggle. Debugging errors in your code forces you to figure out the disconnect between your mental model and reality.
Claude can figure out most errors I show to it much faster than I can, but when we're building something I could build from scratch, I regularly find even Opus 4.7 regularly provides vastly overcomplicated and inferior solutions and I have to redirect it. I assume this is also the case when we're building stuff that's new to me and I just can't recognize all of the overcomplicated suboptimal solutions until I get to testing the behaviors I need to be correct. If I got a tool like this at the start of my career or education, I just don't know how I wouldn't end up completely stunted.