It doesn’t have to be this way. You can use AI in ways that don’t rot your brain. You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself. Or you can treat it more as a mentor / tutor and have it explain why it made certain decisions.
I find that AI fails at things that are truly creative. I have been thoroughly unimpressed with ideas it has had or things it’s written for me. There’s still a lot of room for human creativity.
It baffles me a bit that people are working so hard to replace themselves with AI. It's such a high bar for the AI to hit, and takes the creativity away from the human.
I have a pet theory that perhaps the optimal way to use AI will be more like an "exoskeleton" that turns you into a super-human programmer. Something that plugs the deficiencies of the human programmer, rather than replacing you entirely.
I wouldn't keep the "hardest" tasks. I'd keep the important ones. It's often the same, but there are differences. And I'd argue that the important ones are the ones that you most want to retain the ability to do yourself anyhow.
> You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself.
This sounds a lot like "You can skip the fundamentals of basketball and just focus on dunking!"
Well, the "easy" tasks people are delegating are still leading to atrophy. Stuff like having it take over your writing. Now you feel you cannot write without this crutch. I've seen stuff pitched like AI that makes your slide decks for you. That to me is dangerous because creating the slide deck in a coherent way is imo a very valuable way to understand your project and keep on track with the story you are trying to tell about the work. I think a lot of what we think is easy or even boring has a lot of value in building up our understanding.