I'm taking over thinking from AI. One sentence at a time.
Something I've observed is that I've become increasingly dependent on AI these days.
I use it for coding.
It's amazing at repetitive tasks and is becoming adept at more complex codebases.
I use it for writing.
It's helping me save keystrokes.
And for someone whose fingers hurt when typing, it's a literal painkiller.
I love how I can do a brain dump on an AI.
Blabbering about anything and everything that comes to my mind. Without care for how it sounds or how it looks on paper. Just one sentence after another. Droning on forever.
Then AI spits it back to me.
Much beautifully than I've presented.
Only because I do not try.
That's where I realise...
That I've been outsourcing my thinking process.
Putting words on paper.
Finding better words.
Rearranging them.
Removing fillers.
That's writing.
And writing is fundamentally thinking.
AI makes it really easy to skip all of that.
Maybe I can just accept something that's "almost there but not really".
It's tempting to ditch the process of organizing thoughts, key ideas, or presentation.
Or to read, edit, and re-read the same thing over.
Or thinking that the work is not enough.
Without writing, I find my mind losing it's muscle.
I'm afraid that I'll lose my ability to think in the long term.
I'm not ditching AI entirely.
But I'm committed to thinking without crutches once in a while.
Just to put the reps in.
Some Afterthoughts
It's been a long time since I wrote something from start to finish. Without the practice, I found the process really sluggish. During the entire process, I kept thinking about going back to AI to help me 'rough out the edge'.
It took me a while to put down my thoughts. It helps to start simply by writing one sentence per line. It's an advice from Derek Sivers.
It took me a long while to get it to this initial state:
It's not something I'm proud of but it's the messy middle that nobody shows you or talk about.
I got further along before I succumb to 'cross checking with AI'. I thought to ask it to give me suggestions to improve the piece...
I ditched the conversation and felt ashame.
But that's also where I remembered why I wanted to write this in the first place and added the line:
Maybe I can just accept something that's "almost there but not really".
This post is also inspired by Steph's work on "Writing is Thinking".