It's impossible to retain a skill if you dont use it. I've reached a point where I use AI exclusively for all tasks, because it's far faster and efficient to do so.
What kind of activities do you do to retain cognitive skills?
For every skill that may atrophy, I feel like I am developing experience in 10 new ones. I am not focused on using AI to perform my existing job function though, I am developing new capabilities.
Architecture decisions, requirements analysis, trade-offs in technology selection, and cross-system debugging—these high-level cognitive activities cannot yet be replaced by AI. Focusing on these areas is actually a smarter skill investment.
They can be easily replaced. I suspect we are just engaging in a form of self deception by thinking these choices we make are more than arbitrary decisions driven by nothing but our taste...
In addition to what other people have said, I've taken some time to do leetcode questions lately - both architecture ones and coding ones. I'm not looking for a job by any stretch, but the practice and forcing a detailed zoom in has been really cathartic, and leetcode gives a nice structure/feeling of progress to it.
I honestly don't feel there is much atrophy or this is an issue at all
As if for example someone's skill lessened if they switched from assembly to a higher level programming language over time (like, does it matter?)
If you for some reason had to go back and program more manually, then you could do so as the need arises
Otherwise, LLMs appear to be here to stay and you don't actually need those skills that are even possibly admittedly "atrophying"
I guess we'd need a detailed pinpointing of what skills exist or existed and to identify if they actually ateophy (I guess I'm not sure if skills are really atrophying, or even if they are if it matters)
Edit: here's an idea or exercise or projects to work on. Maybe people should find clear documentation of pre-AI processes in case you need to go back and learn them. Or create such documentation if it doesn't exist (which would be an exercise to practice your skills to make you remember them).
I waltzed into a tech screen thinking I could handcode python after having LLM be primary at it for over a year. Yeah, there's atrophy -- I humiliated myself and took the lesson. :)
There is a meta-argument about whether companies should interview about hand-coding anymore, but... the skills do atrophy. I've been mixing hand-coding into my routines ever since to try to keep those skills lukewarm. I'm not yet sure if I am wasting my time doing so or not.