The "Learned Helplessness" of AI
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
neutral
Category
science
Key topics
AI
Psychology
Learned Helplessness
The article discusses the concept of 'Learned Helplessness' in the context of AI, sparking potential discussions on AI's limitations and psychological parallels.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
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2h
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Hour 3
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Based on 1 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
11/19/2025, 4:54:06 PM
2h ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/19/2025, 7:21:05 PM
2h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
1 comments in Hour 3
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/19/2025, 7:21:05 PM
6m ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
People said the exact same thing about web searches, and I think there's a lot of devs who would instant search for every issue they hit.
Isn't this just better web search?
On the other hand, it definitely feels like it might be too big a step in the spoon feeding direction.
Writing code without AI feels like art, and writing it with AI feels like painting a wall: get it done quickly, cheaply, and good enough that people don't see issues.
It's the art part of engineering that's being lost, AI has no appreciation of elegance. It has no empathy for cognitive overhead of bad code or poor-fit design patterns.
Cognitive Debt is the phrase to Google btw.
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