The Struggle Was the Point
You weren't built by the answers. You were built by the search.
I’ve spent 17 years learning to build things the hard way. Debugging at 2am. Rewriting code that kept breaking in ways I didn’t understand. Shipping products that failed and rebuilding them from scratch.
Last month, I realized I hadn’t done any of that in six months.
Not because the problems got easier. Because I stopped sitting with them long enough to solve them myself. I’d hit a wall, reach for AI, and the wall would disappear. Fifteen seconds. No friction. No frustration. No learning.
I love AI. I co-founded an AI company. I build with it every day. And I’m telling you: something is slipping. Not just for me. Probably for you too.
What the Research Actually Shows
This isn’t just a feeling. It’s being measured.
MIT Media Lab researchers hooked participants up to EEG monitors while they wrote essays, some with ChatGPT, some with a search engine, some with nothing. The AI group showed the weakest brain connectivity. Worse: when they tried to work independently afterward, their brains failed to reactivate to previous levels. The researchers coined a term for it: “cognitive debt.” Short-term efficiency creating long-term cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.
A Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study analyzed 936 real-world AI-assisted tasks across 319 knowledge workers. The finding that stuck with me: people who trusted AI the most engaged in the least critical thinking. Higher confidence in the tool, lower confidence in themselves.
But the study that stopped me cold came from The Lancet. Nineteen experienced doctors, each with over 2,000 colonoscopies, used AI-assisted polyp detection. When the AI was removed, their detection rate dropped from 28.4% to 22.4%. These weren’t beginners. They were experts who got measurably worse at their job after relying on AI. Researchers called it the “Google Maps effect.”
Paul Graham put it plainly in Writes and Write-Nots: “A world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots.”
This isn’t speculation. These are measured outcomes. The pattern is consistent: delegate the thinking, lose the capacity to think.
This Isn’t About Skill Decay. It’s About Identity.
Here’s the thing: those 2am debugging sessions didn’t just teach me debugging. They taught me patience. Systems thinking. The ability to hold a problem in my head for hours without reaching for a shortcut.
The terrible first drafts I wrote for years didn’t just make me a better writer. They taught me to think clearly, to know what I actually believe versus what sounds good.
The startups that failed didn’t just teach me product. They taught me who I am under pressure, and who I’m not.
Every skill you’re proud of was forged in something uncomfortable. Remove the discomfort and you don’t get the same person. You get someone with the output but without the understanding. Researchers call this “productive struggle”, the confusion that precedes understanding, the false starts that teach what doesn’t work, the repetition that builds fluency. It’s not an obstacle to learning. It IS learning.
And here’s the question I can’t stop asking myself: if I’d had AI when I was 22, would I be the same person?
I don’t think I would. And that’s the part that scares me.
My Children Will Never Know a World Without AI
My children are five and seven. They’re learning to read, to add numbers, to sound out words they don’t recognize. Last week, my oldest was stuck on a math problem. She sat there for ten minutes, frustrated, erasing, trying again. She eventually got it. You should have seen her face.
That moment, the frustration and the breakthrough, is where she’s becoming herself.
Psychology Today reported something in March that I haven’t been able to shake: “Adults lose skills to AI. Children never build them.”
Adults experience atrophy. We lose what we had. But children growing up surrounded by AI experience something worse: absence. They never build the neural pathways in the first place.
The World Economic Forum warned the same month that children risk “learning to be human from machines.” The tasks we automate, writing, reasoning, creating, struggling, are the building blocks they need to become thoughtful adults.
My children will never know a world without AI. The struggles that built me into who I am? They might never experience them. Not because anyone took those struggles away. Because nobody thought to protect them.
What I’m Actually Doing About It
I’m not deleting AI. That would be dishonest. It’s my livelihood. I co-founded an AI company. I write with AI, build with AI, think alongside AI. I love what it makes possible.
But some friction is sacred. Not all struggle is wasted time. Some of it is the whole point.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
For Myself
First drafts without AI. Architecture decisions. Strategy docs. Emails that matter. The thinking happens in the drafting. The MIT study showed brains don’t activate the same way when AI does the initial pass. So the first pass is mine. AI refines later.
Debug before I ask. When something breaks, I give myself 15 minutes before reaching for help. That’s where the instinct forms, the pattern recognition that separates a senior engineer from someone who just has the title. The instinct only builds through repetition of the struggle.
The “why” check. One question before reaching for AI: am I delegating drudgework, or am I avoiding thinking? Formatting a document is drudgework. Structuring an argument is thinking. Generating boilerplate code is drudgework. Designing the architecture is thinking. The Microsoft/CMU study found the workers who trusted AI the most checked it the least. Know the difference.
Own the architecture. AI can write the code. I design the system. Architecture is judgment, and judgment is the sum of every wrong decision I made and learned from. You can’t outsource the formation of judgment. Only the output it already produced.
Unplugged reps. Once a week, I work without AI for an hour. Code a feature. Write a post. Solve a problem end to end. Addy Osmani calls this essential: “Keep honing your debugging instincts and system thinking even if an AI gives you a shortcut.” Think of it like a musician who still practices scales. The performance uses technology. The skill is built without it.
For My Children
Protect the struggle window. When they’re stuck on homework, I don’t reach for my phone. Ten minutes of confusion before any help. That confusion isn’t the obstacle to learning. It IS the learning.
Ask questions, not answers. “What have you tried?” and “What do you think?” before solving anything. The Psychology Today research showed that when children never form independent reasoning, AI’s reasoning becomes theirs. The antidote is showing them their own thinking matters.
Protect the analog. Drawing by hand. Building with blocks. Writing on paper. Playing outside with no screen. These aren’t nostalgic luxuries. They build neural pathways that screens can’t replicate. For a five and seven-year-old, these experiences are literally building their brains.
Co-use, never solo-use. When they eventually use AI, we’ll do it together. “Do you think the AI got this right? How would you check?” The habit of questioning is the habit of thinking.
Celebrate the effort, not just the result. Not just the correct answer. The 20 minutes they spent stuck on problem 3 before figuring it out. Make struggle feel valuable, not wasteful.
Because the research is clear, and honestly, so is my gut: the struggle was never the obstacle. The struggle was the point.
The things that built you weren’t efficient. They were hard and slow and frustrating.
And they were yours.
Don’t outsource that. Not from yourself. Not from the people you’re raising.
What’s one thing you’ve stopped struggling with that you wish you hadn’t? And if you’re raising kids, what struggle are you protecting for them?