There's a common misconception about AI: that using it to speed up tasks always saves time. In reality, offloading thinking comes with a hidden cost—you may be sacrificing long-term cognitive capacity for short-term gains.
Here's the rule: if your judgment happens after the output, offload freely. But if your judgment happens during the process, do the thinking yourself. Even if the tool produces something that looks plausible, you're losing the cognitive capacity needed to stay sharp.
The short-term savings are real, but the long-term cost is larger than it looks. Try this: once a month, review what you used AI for and ask: in which cases did I get a better output than I would have produced alone? And in which cases did I get a faster output that wasn't actually better?
Faster is not the same as better. If you're producing faster outputs that are slightly worse, you're trading quality for speed without realizing it. Sometimes that trade is worth it, but you want to make it consciously, not discover six months later that your baseline quality has drifted downward.
The wrong question is "Is my output better?" The better question is "Am I better?" Am I a sharper thinker, a more skilled practitioner, a more capable version of myself? Because the output is temporary. You are not.