Is AI ruining my brain?

AI 正在毁掉我的大脑吗？

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?). 我是一个 AI 怀疑论者、抵制者，也是一个慢热的接受者。这既是因为我担心 AI 的伦理和环境影响，也是因为我喜欢亲力亲为。我会自己织袜子，今年夏天我为门廊做了一个秋千，每年感恩节我都会从零开始做派——连派皮都是自己做的（喜欢我亲手敲出来的破折号吗？）。

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. 我真心热爱编写代码的工作，因此一直不愿将 AI 引入我的工作流程。但最近，我参与了一个团队大量使用 AI 且领域非常复杂的项目，所以我不得不勉强使用它来帮助我理解应用程序的运行逻辑，以及我的改动如何影响那些我甚至从未察觉到的代码区域。

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. 随着我越来越习惯于求助于 Cursor 来解决代码中的卡点，我开始不喜欢我的大脑所发生的变化。我习惯在办公桌旁放着针织活，以便在开会时让双手有事可做，有时在等待 Cursor 回复时，我也会拿起针线。目前，我正在织一件图案相当复杂、且说明极简、难以解读的毛衣。

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! 最近，我退后一步审视自己的作品，发现几行之前的花样织歪了，我意识到我的第一反应竟然是求助于 AI。这让我感到恐惧。我享受针织的全部原因在于过程本身。我花费数十个小时，投入了多到我不想承认的钱去买毛线，织出来的毛衣有时看起来并不比我在亚马逊上花 20 美元买的好。但这根本不是重点！

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. 我享受针织。我喜欢动脑动手，喜欢自己寻找问题的解决方案。当别人说“我喜欢你的毛衣”时，我回答“谢谢，这是我自己做的”，这种感觉棒极了。而当我遇到困难就转向 AI，恰恰与这种成就感背道而驰。老实说，我以前也试过在项目上向 ChatGPT 求助，但它根本没帮上忙。

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. 那么，为什么我会发现自己想用 AI 来修补毛衣呢？显然，我无法将工作中解决问题的方式与我的日常生活隔离开来。即使我能为在工作项目中使用 AI 找到正当理由（这本身就是一个巨大的假设），我也不是美剧《人生切割术》（Severance）里的角色。我在工作中做的事情会影响我的整个大脑。

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? 习惯于将繁琐的任务交给 AI，并让它解释我不熟悉的事物，而不是自己去钻研，这似乎降低了我为工作之外的难题付出努力的意愿。这种影响会渗透到我生活的哪个地步？当“让 Cursor 把正确的 props 传给正确的 React 组件”变成“把与孩子沟通的任务外包给 ChatGPT”时，那会是什么样？

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. 对于这些问题，我没有答案，但我可以为一件事感到自豪：我的第一反应是让 ChatGPT 修复我的针织活，但我没有止步于此。我停下来，思考了 ChatGPT 会如何处理这个问题，以及我会如何处理，然后我决定，靠自己去克服困难是值得的。AI 还没有毁掉我的大脑，但我会持续关注，确保它不会发生。