The “cost” of AI

I have been religiously using Claude Code and Claude UI for the past few months. I must admit, it does an incredible job across a wide variety of tasks: coding, writing, brainstorming, and answering random questions that pop into my head. This writing, for instance, was edited with assistance from AI. But there’s a fear growing in me that delegating these tasks, and ultimately the thinking process, to AI will sooner or later lead to a degradation of my own ability to think and write.

The discourse around using AI for these tasks has been conflicting and polarized. Some say that AI is just a tool that helps speed up processes that used to take hours or days, while the thinking and decision-making remain on the human side. Others say that AI has been doing everything for us, including the thinking, we risk losing our own cognitive abilities. I find myself in the latter camp.

To push back against this, I’ve been keeping a journaling habit for over a month. Each entry is only a few sentences, but I still count it as a win toward building the habit and becoming a better writer. At some point, though, I caught myself thinking: do I even need to master writing? today’s AI is already better at writing than I am, and maybe in the future a messy, unstructured brain dump will be enough to steer it toward something clearer and more polished.

But writing clearly is something I’ve always wanted to master, even before AI became this capable. It was never just about producing clean output. It’s about having a voice, a personal touch—something that’s mine. That’s what I’m afraid of losing.

The thinking side of this troubles me more. Several analyses that I’ve produced were mostly AI-generated, with minimal intervention from me. Most of the time, the output was well-written and well-reasoned. But I’ve handed off the parts that are supposed to be mine: the brainstorming, the analytical work, the thinking. I haven’t figured out how to take that back without avoiding AI altogether, which would mean the work taking significantly longer.

I don’t have any resolution here. but what I do know is this is something I need to take seriously before the habit of delegation becomes permanent.