Sharper Still

There's this thing people say now: that the tools are changing us. That we're losing something. That the person who used to sit down and think through a problem is being slowly replaced by the person who asks a machine to think for them, and honestly, I get why that lands. It's not an unreasonable fear.

But I want to push back on it for a second. Not because I think it's entirely wrong, but because I think the framing is off.

When you pick up a new skill—really pick it up, not just skim a tutorial—the person you were before that skill starts to fade. That's not loss. That's refinement. The old version of you doesn't get destroyed so much as it gets polished down into something that can do more, see more, hold more weight without cracking.

I think about carpentry sometimes. Not because I'm any good at it [No, dear, I cannot make that mid-century Asian-inspired credenza you've been eyeballing and not-so-subtly hintdropping about.], but because the metaphor holds up. There's a guy who's never touched a jointer plane, never attempted a dovetail joint, never really understood why wood moves the way it does. And then one day he learns. He picks up the plane, figures out the angle, starts producing joints that actually fit. The old version of him—the one who would've just grabbed a nail gun and called it done, that guy is gone. And nobody mourns him, because the new version is better. Not better in some abstract motivational-poster way, but functionally, practically, observably more capable.

That's what tools do when they work right. They don't replace you. They refine you.

There's a line I keep coming back to—and I'm not going to dress it up with attribution because either it lands for you or it doesn't—about putting away childish things. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I reasoned as a child. But at some point you set those things down. Not because they were bad, but because you outgrew them. You don't want milk anymore; you want a steak.

And I think that's closer to what's actually happening with AI tools than the narrative we keep hearing. The narrative says erosion—as though something is being worn away against our will, ground down by a force we didn't invite. But what if it's formation? What if the discomfort people feel isn't loss at all but the growing pains of becoming someone who can operate at a higher level—someone who's been shaped by the tools they chose to pick up?

That reframing matters to me. Because erosion is passive. It happens to you. Formation is something you participate in. You show up. You do the work. You let the process change you because you trust that the person on the other side of it will be more than the person who went in.

I'm not naïve about the counterpoint. And the counterpoint is real.

When you stop doing the thinking yourself, when you just accept the output and move on, no critical evaluation, no "wait, is this actually right," you're not being sharpened. You're going dull. The edge that made you useful, the part of you that could sit with a hard problem and reason through it, that atrophies if you never use it. And the thing about atrophy is that it's quiet. You don't notice it happening until one day you reach for a capacity that used to be there and it's just...not.

The light slowly goes out.

So the question isn't whether to use the tools. That cheese has long since been eaten, and I'm on it—I'm literally using an AI tool to help me write this, which is either ironic or perfectly appropriate depending on how generous you're feeling. The question is whether the tools are shaping you or just doing things for you. Because those are not the same thing. [And no, using AI to proofread is not the only thing I've done for this piece...it was getting a bit rambly, so I used it to trim things while retaining my voice. It was...helpful.]

A tool that shapes you leaves you sharper than it found you. A tool you lean on so hard that you forget how to stand isn't a tool anymore. That's called a crutch. And crutches are fine when you're healing, but nobody wants to use one forever.

I don't have a clean answer here. I don't think there is one. But my instinct—and it's just that, an instinct—is that the safeguard isn't in the tool itself. It's in the question you ask after the tool gives you its answer:

Is this reasonable?

Three words. That's it. If you can still ask that question and mean it, if you can look at what the machine produced and bring your own judgment to bear on whether it's actually good, then you're still in the game. You're still being formed. The tool is doing what tools are supposed to do.

But the moment you stop asking, the moment the output just flows through you, frictionless, that's when the old fear earns its keep.

I'd rather be refined than eroded. I think most people would. The difference is just whether you're paying attention.