> How do you know their skills and knowledge are declining rapidly

I was describing anecdotally what I have witnessed. Devs that I used to have a reasonably high opinion of struggling to explain or understand the PRs they are making

> Does using an LLM cause one to suddenly forget everything?

I think we can probably agree that when you stop using skills, those skills will atrophy to some extent

Can we also agree that using LLMs to generate code is different from the skill of writing code?

If so, it stands to reason that the more people rely on LLMs to generate things for them, the more their skills of creating those things by hand will atrophy

I don't think it should be very controversial to think that LLMs are making people worse at things

It is also entirely possible that people are becoming better (or faster, anyways. Extremely debatable if faster = better imo) at building software using LLMs while also becoming worse at actually writing code

I could definitely see that happen. Besides people simply getting out of practice (or never getting any to being with), automation complacency is a real problem.

We'll need to be even more intentional about when to use LLMs than we should arguably already be about any type of automation.