I am an AI skeptic/hater/slow adopter, due to a combination of concerns about the ethics and environmental impact of AI and the fact that I like doing things myself. I knit my own socks, I built a swing for my porch this summer, and every Thanksgiving I make pies from scratch — even the crust (do you like my handmade em dash?). I truly enjoy the work of writing code, so I have been hesitant to involve AI in my workflow.

But recently, I’ve been working on a project where the team uses a lot of AI and the domain is very complex, so I’ve reluctantly been using it to help me understand what is happening in the app and how changes I make affect areas of the app I didn’t even know existed. As I get more and more comfortable turning to Cursor to help me get unstuck in my code, I do not like what is happening to my brain.

I keep knitting near my desk so I have a way to keep my hands busy in meetings and I’ve been picking it up while waiting for a response from Cursor sometimes. I’m currently working on a pretty complicated sweater pattern with minimal instructions that are hard to interpret. I recently stepped back to look at my work and saw the pattern had gotten wonky a few rows back and realized my first instinct was to turn to AI. This horrified me.

The whole reason I enjoy knitting is the process. I spend dozens of hours and more money than I’d like to admit on yarn to create a sweater that sometimes looks no better than a $20 one I could have gotten on Amazon. But that’s not the point! I enjoy knitting. I like using my brain and my hands and figuring out solutions to problems. It feels amazing to respond to “I like your sweater” with “THANKS I MADE IT ALL BY MYSELF”. Turning to AI when I encounter a bump in the road is the opposite of that. And to be totally honest, I have tried asking ChatGPT for help on projects before and it didn’t help at all. So why did I find myself reaching for AI to fix my sweater?

Apparently, I can’t isolate the way I solve problems at work from the rest of my life. Even if I can justify using it on my work project (a big if), I’m not a character in Severance. What I do at work affects my whole brain. Getting into the habit of handing AI tedious tasks and asking it to explain things I’m not familiar with instead of trying to figure them out myself seems to have decreased how much work I’m willing to put into hard things outside of work. How far will it creep into my life? When does asking Cursor to pass the right props into the right React components turn into outsourcing talking to my kids to ChatGPT?

I don’t have the answers to any of this, but I can be proud of something: my first instinct was to ask ChatGPT to fix my knitting, but I didn’t stop there. I paused, thought about how ChatGPT would approach the problem and how I would approach it, and decided that it was worth struggling through on my own. AI hasn’t ruined my brain yet, but I’m going to keep checking to make sure.

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