You're misrepresenting the potential problem. It's more along the lines of using AI stops you exercising the cognitive processes you would doing things yourself and those encompass skills, knowledge and brain function that can atrophy. For an extreme example you can look at cognitive decline in the elderly which can be mitigated by taking part in activities that are cognitively stimulating.

Can you comment on other jobs though? The large majority of jobs require no big mental effort? Even switching from programming to management would go through that. Under that light it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again because they'd atrophy so quickly?

I can't answer for the other guy, but my answer would be that talking to a clanker is LESS mental effort than being a manager, and that's why your reasoning atrophies so quickly.

Managers can go back to being technical, because they are still interacting with problems that require human thinking. Token farmers don't.

I think you're probably castrophizing the impact with statements like "it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again" because that's not the likely outcome as I understand things. But yes people who stop programming for an appreciable amount of time do find it harder to pick back up again.

The longer the manager is out of the game, the harder it is to return to the game. Returning to the game takes time. Depending on age and income, returning to the game may be impossible for some people over time.

I think you need to read the studies linked in the footnotes. This is a well-studied issued.

If you constantly pawn a task or cognitive load onto someone else (AI or not), you'll eventually get worse and worse at that particular type of thinking. Your overall mind doesn't necessarily get weaker, but you definitely start to get worse at anything you don't regularly practice.

You can definitely feel it when you talk against an AI vs doing the churn yourself. It's comfortable, simple, it doesn't aggravate you.