A very powerful theme has been meandering through the ether the past 12-18 months or so about the cognitive offloading that has happened in large waves when AI dominance began. I would largely agree that I have trained myself out of the old ways of doing things and am fully absorbed in the new way of working. There has been a lot of division on this topic and I believe that there is another thread that has yet to be pulled on. The companies that are starting to actually thrive in the age of AI (I look at Apple crushing decade old bugs and technical debt, Cloudflare shipping an insane amount of free shit for the internet to use, etc.), I think it's because they started asking the question, was the old way the right way? Or was it the bridge to the new way?
Writing code before AI feels to me like what typing on a typewriter was in the 40s/50s. The only way to fucking do it. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap while some old white dude yapped at you. Well now your computer can not only listen to you talk but it can understand what you want. That means that instead of me using my brain to figure out the web of emails and contacts for an integration project, I can connect it to my email inbox and say "who the fuck do I need to talk to to get an answer for where this project is? Draft an email to that person and cc all the other people who need to be brought in".
If this was 2025, you would be looked at like a reckless individual with no morals, but end of 2026, I fully trust that when I say jump, these fucking things say how high. (Obvs you have hard blocks on prod and protections on your shit but you can pretty much let them run free these days.) Running free doesn't mean running blind though. It drafts the email, I read it before it goes out. Anything that touches money, a client or prod gets my eyes on it first, every time. I don't think that I am losing the skill of using my cognitive brain for an hour sorting through emails and trying to make a timeline up in my brain. That is a waste of time and my mental capacity. At the end of my day, I want LESS decision fatigue and MORE openness to life.
James Haydon has a perfect piece called "Solving Passport Application with Haskell" that nails this concept. https://jameshaydon.github.io/passport/ Because the UK's nationality laws (specifically the British Nationality Act 1981) are notoriously complex, he breaks down the incredibly convoluted bureaucratic "if-else" rules required to prove "Applicant is British". This is exactly my point. We made stupid rules and have to play by them using our really keen brains, which actually burns the time we have to use them for other creative things (like writing Haskell programs that solve a British Passport Application process).
Here is another one, it's tax time, and you forgot which form you were told by your tax person last year about claiming a special health benefit. You remember there was a weird stipulation because you have three feet you had to file a form first that unlocks the other ability to file the forms you need. Before AI, I am reading through government websites for a week and googling shit until you find some random dude on some forum that happens to also have three feet and the same weird stipulation that you fill out a 5578A, then wait 14 days and submit a 670B. Just to then realize that forum is ten years old and the next comment down says they changed that rule last year and don't accept 5578As anymore. Now I get to say "I forgot which form I need to fill out for claiming this special health benefit, I remember it being a weird process because I have three feet, can you figure that out for me?" And then it goes and reads through all the stupid shit and makes you a steps 1 through 10 list. And yeah, AI can find that same ten-year-old forum post. So I make it link the current government page for every step and tell me when that page was last updated. If a step only comes from some dude in 2015, I see it right away and it gets thrown out. It's not making me lazy or increasing my level of stupidity. It is solving the complexity that we have created in our own society by figuring out the rules, and then playing within them. I personally don't want to learn the rules, I just want the game to be over so I can go back to my life.
So I actually believe that I am increasing my cognitive ability because my bandwidth isn't being burnt on stupid broken systemic problems that make me go… wow, I can't believe that's what you need for your system to accept me. That bandwidth goes back to the simple things, like journalling, reading a book, or socializing with your friends and family.
