thesis
i think ai only makes sense as a tool if you have already been through the cognitive struggle yourself. using a model to skip the hard work of learning is the dangerous, destructive behavior that pundits warn about. the struggle is the most important part of the learning process because it cements concepts in your brain. if you have not paid those dues, you cannot evaluate what the ai produces, which means you are borrowing speed today against a mountain of troubleshooting debt tomorrow.
context
the current conversation about ai is obsessed with acceleration. every tool promises to write your code, draft your emails, and solve your problems in seconds. it is incredibly tempting to use these models to bypass the slow, tedious parts of any task.
this speed is intoxicating, but it creates a quiet crisis in how we learn. when you let an ai solve every problem for you, you are not actually learning. you are just supervising an automated process. this issue is something i have felt directly while looking at my own habits, and it connects to what i wrote about in the danger of trusting the ai agent, where speed without deep understanding leads directly to low confidence and hidden bugs.
argument
the reason the cognitive struggle is necessary is because your brain operates like a physical system. in fitness, you do not build strength by watching someone else lift weights, and you do not build it by using a machine that does the work for you. you must place a difficult load on the system to trigger adaptations of strength. your brain is a muscle, too, and it needs exercise and struggle. it needs the pains if you want the gains.
i am effective at using ai today only because i have spent more than a decade facing constant cognitive struggles. i have spent long nights trying to debug a single broken join, rewriting data pipelines that failed under load, and struggling to understand complex system architectures. those lessons stuck with me because they were painful.
that history of struggle is exactly why i am able to use ai without losing my way. when an agentic tool outputs a solution, i do not blindly accept it. i question it. i scan the output and recognize solutions that will not work because i have tried those exact approaches before myself. i remember the pain of working for hours only to find out a specific solution was not viable, and that memory acts as an immediate check on the model's overconfidence.
if you have already been through this process, then ai becomes an incredibly powerful tool. it accelerates your execution because you already have the mental model to guide it, verify its work, and spot its subtle errors. you can drive fast because you have the lane discipline i described in the guardrails i actually use with ai agents. but if you use ai to skip the struggle entirely, you never build those mental models in the first place.
this is why i believe we need to be comfortable being uncomfortable. the awkward, frustrating hours where you are stuck on a problem are not wasted time. they are the exact moments where the learning actually happens.
tension or counterpoint
some people argue that ai can be a personal tutor, showing you the right way to solve a problem so you can learn faster. they believe that by reading clean, correct code generated by an ai, you can bypass the messy trial-and-error phase.
there is some truth to this, but reading a solution is not the same as finding it. if you do not experience the friction of making mistakes and correcting them, your brain does not build the deep neural pathways required to retain that knowledge. you might understand the solution in the moment, but you will not remember it when you have to solve a similar problem under pressure without help. the struggle is not an obstacle to learning, but rather it is the learning itself.
closing
i do not use ai to replace my thinking, but rather to accelerate the execution of what i already understand. the next time you are tempted to ask an ai to solve a difficult problem for you, try to sit with the discomfort a little longer. struggle with the code, read the documentation, and let your brain do the heavy lifting first.
once you have been through that fire, then you can bring in the ai to speed you up. the tool is only as good as the human driving it, and that driver is only as good as the struggles they have survived.
further reading
- cognitive load (how working memory limits affect learning and retention)
- desirable difficulties (why making learning harder actually improves long-term retention)
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