Do you find yourself genuinely building skills with AI assistance, or do you notice your baseline abilities getting softer over time because you reach for the tool first?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There's a real tension between using AI as a learning tool versus using it as a shortcut that bypasses learning entirely.

When I use something like ChatGPT or Claude to understand a new concept, sometimes I come away genuinely understanding it better than I would have from a textbook. Other times I just copy the output and move on, having learned nothing.

The question is whether that's a problem with AI itself, or just human nature meeting a new tool. We said the same thing about calculators, search engines, and Wikipedia.

But AI feels different because it doesn't just retrieve information, it does the thinking steps for you. A calculator still requires you to know what equation to set up. An AI will figure out the equation, solve it, and explain it, all without you engaging critically at any point if you choose not to.