Thinking is your edge

Published Oct 22, 2025 · Around 2 minutes to read

I was debating some friends about why AI is terrible for learning. Their argument was that people are no longer putting in the reps to build a deeper understanding of their work. My argument was that people need to put in different kinds of reps. AI has raised the floor on tooling, and the shape of work is evolving.

But there was one thing we agreed on: juniors are screwed.

My friends aren’t AI skeptics. They use it all the time. The difference is that we’ve all done the grunt work earlier in our careers.

I’ve pushed countless pixels since I got my hands on my dad’s Windows 3.1 Toshiba in the 90s. And I’ve been adding to my toolbox of skills manually. Tediously. As a result, I have the wisdom to know when a design looks, works, and feels good.

Juniors today have better tools, but lack wisdom.

I sometimes let the AI think for me: generating ideas, words, and images. And I feel like my thinking gets sloppier when I let AI take over. If it feels this dangerous as a senior, it must be outright catastrophic for a junior. And they’d lack the wisdom to know better.

My daughter’s currently applying to a technical high school which requires an essay for admission. I reviewed her draft and I could immediately tell she used AI (em dashes everywhere). To her credit, the ideas in the essay were hers. She just chose AI to rewrite it. I made here rewrite the entire thing manually.

Shortcuts are fine. But only after you’ve put the work in.

“Borrowed wisdom breaks under pressure because you haven't earned it. You're trusting someone else's compression without knowing what created it. Earned wisdom, on the other hand, holds up because it's rooted in your actual experience. You know when it works, why it works, when to ignore it and when to bend it because you created the compression.” — Shane Parrish

Get stuck. It’s the only way to learn.

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P.S. “Everybody wants be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.” — Ronnie Coleman