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Hey {{first_name | there}},
"If all AI tools disappeared tomorrow, would you still be able to work?"
Someone asked this recently and my first thought was:
Of course I could. I ran an entire content business before any of this existed.
But the thing is, right now my publishing pipeline is nine agents deep. My research starts with a search API, not a browser. I haven't written a first draft from a blank page in months.
If every model disappeared the next second, I wouldn't stop working. But I'd be slow in a way that would genuinely embarrass me.
Maybe you can relate too, so let’s talk about it.
The Great AI Divide
Right now we've sorted ourselves into two camps that both refuse to look at it straight.
On one side, people who won't touch AI at all. They add "-ai" to every Google search to strip out the AI summaries.
On the other side, people who run every decision through a chatbot. What to reply to their boss. Whether to take the job. What they think about a news story. They've stopped forming first drafts of their own opinions.
And this isn't a fringe split. 50% of US adults are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, while only 10% are more excited than concerned. That's a 5 to 1 ratio in a country building most of this technology.
Notice what neither camps is doing. Neither is asking what the tool is good at.
The refuser never finds out. The dependent never checks. Both have replaced a hard question with a comfortable answer, which is the one thing I'd have said AI was supposed to help us stop doing.
What's Actually Happening When You Offload
The word for this is cognitive offloading. It's not new.
Writing something down instead of memorizing it is offloading. So is using a calculator. Your phone offloaded your ability to recall phone numbers about fifteen years ago and nobody wrote an essay about it.
So why does this one feel different?
Because the earlier tools took over storage. This one takes over the reasoning.
A researcher ran surveys and interviews with 666 people to test exactly this. The finding: frequent AI tool use correlated with lower critical thinking scores, and cognitive offloading was the mechanism connecting the two.
Younger participants, the heaviest users, scored lowest.
One caveat I want to be fair about: that's correlational. It's possible people with weaker critical thinking habits reach for AI more in the first place. The study can't fully separate those.
But here's the part I can't argue away from my own experience.
The struggle was never the obstacle. The struggle was the mechanism. When you sit with a messy problem for forty minutes, you're not being inefficient. You're building the internal model that lets you spot when an answer is wrong later.
Skip the forty minutes and you get the answer. You just don't get the model.
And you only find out the model is missing when something breaks and you're staring at output you can no longer evaluate.
Take This Small Test
Enough theory. Here's how you find out where you actually stand.
MIT Media Lab put 54 people in EEG caps and had them write essays across three sessions. One group used ChatGPT, one used search, one used nothing.
Of the ChatGPT group, 83% could not quote a single line from the essay they had just finished writing.
That's the test, and you can run it on yourself tonight in five minutes:
1. Open the last thing you shipped with AI. An article, an email, a deck, a function. Close the file. Now write down its core argument from memory. Not the topic. The actual argument, and why it was structured that way.
2. Pick one task you now automate. Do it manually once, timed. Not to prove a point. To find out whether the skill is dormant or gone. Dormant comes back in a week. Gone takes months.
3. Ask yourself the last question you'd struggle to answer. When did you last argue with an AI output and win? If you can't remember, you've stopped reviewing and started accepting.
I also posted a similar test like this on my instagram account you can try doing that too: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbnMDbaDz9n/
None of that made me want to quit using these tools. It made me want to keep a few things off the pile.
What This Means For You
I'm not going to tell you to use less AI. That's useless advice and I wouldn't follow it either.
Here's the rule you should always follow: automate the output, protect the judgment.
The pipeline can research, draft, format, and publish. Fine. That's execution and execution scales. But the decision about what's worth publishing, whether an argument holds, and what my actual opinion is has to stay expensive. It has to stay mine.
The moment those become cheap, I have nothing to sell. Neither do you.
That's the real answer to whether you could work without AI tomorrow. Not whether you'd be slower. You would be, and so would I.
Whether you'd still know what you were doing.
- Aashish
P.S. If you want to connect with other people thinking about this stuff, I run an AI community where we don't just share news, we actually talk through these things.
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