Smarter tools, same habits
AI forces us to confront how clearly we think. Butt hurt right?
Smarter tools, same habits
Every few months, a new AI model arrives with better benchmarks, larger context windows, improved reasoning, and more powerful tools.
The progress is difficult to ignore.
A few years ago, asking an AI to analyze thousands of rows from a csv or xlsx from your favorite spreadsheet would have felt unreliable. Today, many tools can grep logs, summarize documents, generate code, and even reason across multiple files. The arsenal keeps growing.
The question I keep asking myself is whether I am growing with it.
We spend a lot of time measuring how much AI has improved. We compare models, context windows, and coding abilities. What we measure less often is whether our behavior has improved alongside the technology.
A simple example comes to mind.
Someone notices a broken banner on a static landing page (their website). Instead of pressing f12 to open the browser's dev tools and inspecting the CSS, they immediately ask AI to fix it. The banner gets fixed, but now the footer overlaps the body. Another prompt follows. The footer gets fixed, but another layout issue appears somewhere else.
The original problem is gone, but nobody can clearly explain what happened. I do not know if determining root cause nowadays is now scarce, but the way I see things, we sometimes celebrate and flex the output so quickly that we forget to ask how we got there in the first place.
The issue is not that AI failed. The issue is that understanding was delegated together with the task.
This is not limited to software development or anything about IT. The same pattern appears in writing, research, analysis and even everyday office work. We have more powerful tools than ever before, yet many of us still approach problems with the same habits we had years ago.
Maybe the biggest change AI introduced is not automation. Perhaps it is confrontation.
AI forces us to confront how clearly we think. Butt hurt right? But it is truly a slap in our inner-self that maybe there is something lacking, and probably we do not want to go to that rabbit hole because it will exert more effort and energy.
In a strange way, AI has made me doubt myself more often.
Not because I trust this robot blindly, but because it constantly reveals more ambiguity. It asks me to be more specific. More deliberate. More aware of what I am actually trying to accomplish. In other words, it is just another way of telling me Hey human, do me a favor, can you please think harder?.
Maybe that is the real challenge of the AI era. Not whether the models will continue improving. But whether we will improve the way we think, ask questions, and understand the work we are trying to accomplish.
The tools are getting smarter.
Are we?