A real worry, and a fair one. If it writes my emails, does my sums and drafts my thinking — do I quietly get worse at all of it? Like a sat-nav slowly erasing your sense of direction. Yes, that can happen. Here's how I try to stop it happening to me.
🧭 The sat-nav problem
You used to know the way. Then the sat-nav knew it for you, and one day you realised you couldn't get there without it. Lean on any tool hard enough and the underlying skill quietly fades. AI can absolutely do this — to your writing, your problem-solving, even your patience for sitting with a hard thought.
✍️ Do the thinking, outsource the typing
Here's the distinction that matters: there's a difference between using it to skip the grunt work and using it to skip the thinking. Let it format, draft, tidy and summarise all day long. Don't let it decide what you believe, what's good, or what you'd actually say. Keep ownership of the judgement; hand off the labour.
🏋️ Keep the muscles you care about
Pick the skills that genuinely matter to you and keep doing them by hand sometimes, on purpose. I still write the things that matter to me from scratch. Decide which of your skills are core to who you are or what you sell — and protect those. Use AI freely on the rest.
🔍 Use it to learn, not just to finish
Flip it from a shortcut into a tutor. "Explain why." "Show me how you got there." "Give me three other ways to approach this." Used like that, it makes you sharper rather than duller — you come away understanding more than when you started, not less.
🌱 The honest check
Every so often, ask yourself: could I still do this without it? If the answer's starting to feel like no — and it's a skill you care about — that's your signal to put the tool down for a bit. Not out of fear. Just to stay the kind of capable you actually want to be.