I build with AI every day, so take this as a note from inside the tent, not a warning shouted from outside it. The tools are extraordinary. That is exactly why I keep watching the thing they quietly cost us.
AI has folded into search, into work, into the ordinary texture of a day so completely that the answer to almost anything is now one sentence away. When something is that easy, you stop earning it. You stop fact-checking. You stop testing. You stop sitting with a problem long enough to turn it over. The friction that used to force you to think is simply gone.
That friction was never the enemy. It was the training. Every time you worked a problem by hand — got it wrong, traced the error, tried again — you were building a muscle. Self-creative conceptualisation, the ability to make something from a blank page, is not a gift you either have or you don't. It is a set of reps. And the reps are the first thing to go when the answer arrives for free.
What worries me is the compounding. The soft skills — judgement, taste, the instinct that something is off before you can say why — are the slowest to build and the quietest to lose. You don't notice them leaving. You notice, months later, that you can't hold a hard problem in your head the way you used to, that your first idea is now somebody else's idea, that you reach for the tool before you've even tried.
I'm not anti-AI. I'd be a hypocrite, and it would waste the best leverage any of us has been handed. But leverage and replacement are different things. Lean on it a little and it extends you. Lean on it entirely and it slowly removes the reason to have the capacity at all. The difference is whether your hands stay on the wheel.
So I treat it as a sparring partner, not a crutch. I still write the first draft badly. I still fact-check the thing that sounds right. I still practise the skills I could technically outsource, because practising them is the whole point. The people who will matter in a few years aren't the ones who used AI the most. They're the ones who kept their own judgement sharp while everyone else let theirs soften. That is the thing worth protecting — in myself, and in the people I work with.