Losing Skills
For the last year, I've been driving a 2025 Toyota Sienna, a boat of a minivan. It's got all sorts of fancy features that I won't get into right now, but the big one that bothers me the most is a "lane drift" sensor that makes the steering wheel vibrate if you start to leave your lane (without a turn signal) and will actually turn the wheel/redirect the vehicle for you if you drift too far. Ostensibly, this is a great feature, as it helps you notice a Very Bad Thing 
, but I've found that it's had the opposite effect on me.
Even tho I can toggle it off, and I now do, I've spent enough time with it on that I've noticed that I drift in my lanes significantly more. I drive a "normal" car pretty frequently as well, a 2016 Subaru, and regardless of how determined I am to pay attention, the last year I've had more close calls and moments of lane drifting that in the 20+ years of driving beforehand. I have lost my habitual lane touching, my gentle turns and checks that keep the car centered in my lane, because I have quite accidentally learned to drive with bowling bumpers. Instead of staying consistently midline, I grew to accept and rely on bouncing between the edges of the lane, making me a less safe driver for my self, my family, and for everyone on the highway around me.
Having noticed this the last couple months, I've been making a concerted effort to relearn this skill, to focus my whole attention on staying centered in the lanes, to keep distractions to a minimum, to place my hands where they should go. It's slow work, truthfully, but I refuse to back down and will not allow myself to ever use such a feature again. Cars are evil, dangerous creatures and demand respect.
I can't help but note the similarities with this "feature" and generative ai tooling. Skills are like muscles, only growing through consistency, struggle, and progressive overload. They will not develop if you don't push yourself, and they will atrophy if you don't use them. What happens when you use a tool to "benefit" your thought, which makes decisions for you? When do you flex and push and struggle, exercising and refining and expressing your hard-earned skills, if a tool is generating approximately-correct results for you?
In the preface to On Lisp, Paul Graham writes (emphasis mine), "In Lisp, you can do much of your planning as you write the program. Why wait for hindsight? As Montaigne found, nothing clarifies your ideas like trying to write them down. Once you’re freed from the worry that you’ll paint yourself into a corner, you can take full advantage of this possibility." When we deny ourselves the chance to clarify our own ideas, we are losing the very skill that makes us capable of solving problems. Learn Python the Hard Way demands that you type every code example yourself, no cheating by copy-pasting. Typing the code is the process! It is the learning, as much as reading or reasoning or anything else. The work is the work.
Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.