noticed this last week when i tried to write something without ai for the first time in maybe three months. a simple 300 word thing, notes really, nothing anyone would see. i sat there and couldnt produce anything. not writers block, something worse. my brain wouldnt let me write the crappy first version.
for six months my workflow has been: think for a minute, paste the context into chatgpt, get a draft, edit it. the edit step is where i thought my value was still going in. and it was, technically. the drafts i was shipping were better than what i used to ship alone.
but the thing that got quietly deleted wasnt the draft itself. it was the ability to produce a bad one. writing a terrible first paragraph used to be how i figured out what i actually wanted to say. the second paragraph is where i discovered id been wrong in the first. the whole thing was a thinking exercise where the bad writing was the point.
now i cant do it. i start typing something and immediately hear a voice saying why are you even putting effort into this, just paste it into the model and skip the garbage step. the voice is right by every efficiency metric and it is also slowly removing a thing i used to be able to do.
the tell is how it feels. before ai, writing a bad first draft felt like actual work. now the same task feels physically embarrassing, like youre watching yourself be slow. that embarrassment is the atrophy.
the honest counter is that maybe bad first drafts were never load bearing. calculators didnt ruin math, maybe this is just the same thing one level up. i dont fully believe that but i also dont want to be the guy romanticising struggle for its own sake.
anyone else tracking whether your pre-ai thinking muscles still work, or a specific task you used to do that you cant do anymore? im curious if this is a me problem or a me plus six months of heavy use problem.
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