Procedural Collapse: A Structural Account of Disengagement in LLM-Assisted Writing

Abstract

When students use large language models for writing, the dominant explanation for disengagement is dispositional: they are over-reliant, and the remedy is to scaffold self-regulation. We argue that a structural explanation is needed, offering an alternative basis for design interventions to support appropriate AI-assisted writing. Current LLM writing interfaces induce procedural collapse: the replacement of an iterative, self-paced writing process with a single output that shifts the writer's task from generation to comprehensive evaluation. Because that evaluation is costly, shallow engagement becomes the default, and the cognitive work writing was supposed to produce goes unperformed. The framework points toward design directions that reduce the burden on writers to self-regulate, including decomposed interaction, goal elicitation as a default first step, and single-level output. They complement metacognitive scaffolding by restructuring the interaction itself.