I used to have thoughts. Now I have prompts

It started with the boring stuff. The things I genuinely did not want to do.

"Reformat this messy spreadsheet I extracted from a messier access DB." "Convert this unformatted email into a spreadsheet checklist" "Write a regex to..." Perfectly reasonable uses. I was saving time, being efficient, being smart about my energy. Then the tasks got smaller.

I started asking things I used to just Google. "What flag do I pass to list hidden files?" "How do I kill a process by port?", "PWM frequency formula" Small stuff, but stuff I'd looked up before and knew I'd look up again. Why not just ask? It's faster, I told myself. Two seconds instead of ten. Still reasonable, right?

Then one afternoon I was working on one of my projects and I stopped, opened the chat and typed "how to check if a pointer is NULL before freeing?" I hit enter before I even realized what I was doing. For those who don't see the problem: freeing a NULL pointer in C is safe. It does nothing. You don't need to check. This is not a gotcha. This is not an edge case. This is just how free() works, and I have known this for years. I have written these exact lines more times than I can count.

free(ptr);
ptr = NULL;

I didn't forget. I just didn't think. That's the part that gets me.

And that wasn't even the worst one. Yesterday I asked it, and I'm not proud of this, I wanted to know how many hours of sleep I would get if I slept at midnight and woke up at 7. I opened the chat and typed the question. I waited for the answer. Seven hours. It told me seven hours. I am a grown adult with a degree in electrical engineering and I could not be bothered to do first-grade math.

The thing is, I don't think I'm lazy. I think my brain found a shortcut and started treating every cognitive task, no matter how small, as something that could be offloaded. It's not about saving time anymore. It's a reflex. Something slightly unclear appears in front of me and my fingers are already moving toward a chat box before I've even decided to open it.

I've started forgetting things I used to know. Not big things, not yet, but the small stuff. The kind of knowledge that lives in your fingers. The kind you don't even think about, you just do. Except now I think about it, decide it's faster to ask, and never actually do it. So the muscle just sits there.

The worst part is that when I actually sit down and try to work something out myself, I get impatient. Not with the problem. With my own brain. Ten seconds of thinking and I'm already annoyed that the answer isn't there yet. That's new. That didn't happen before.

I don't know exactly where the line is between a useful tool and a crutch. But I think typing "sort a list in Python" to an AI is a pretty clear sign I've crossed it.

So I'm drawing a line. Small tasks, I do myself. Questions I can answer with one Google DuckDuckGo search, I search. Thinking I can do alone, I do alone. I'll be slower. I'll be mildly annoyed. My brain will have to wake up again.

It's going well. I only asked it to proofread this text once.