Almost a year ago, I responded here on Thought Shrapnel to what I thought was a terrible paper which claimed to show, via brain scans, that using LLMs was bad for students' cognitive development. As Philippa Hardman notes in this article, the academic literature has begun caught up with what people actually using these tools already know: The theoretical picture sharpened in 2025–26. Favero et al. (2025) warned that cognitive offloading undermines learning outcomes unless the mental effort that’s freed up gets redirected towards other meaningful tasks.
Sometimes the highest good is not an uninterrupted flow from intention to completion. Sometimes the more human outcome – the one that promotes agency – is the one that introduces a pause that's long enough to notice, judge, reconsider, and perhaps to choose differently.