before I ask AI to write anything, I prepare a plan, I was very positively surprised when noticed Plan mode in Codex recently. It make me feel that maybe others doing the same and that's why they added it. Anyway, I start with plan, then ask AI to do just one step.

If coding a new feature, I do one step and check the code, doing git diff, reading changes, or just asking Codex, to show me changes.

If writing an article, I ask for only one paragraph. I read paragraph and if it is ok, I accept it, if it doesn't show off my thoughts I work on one paragraph.

If doing data analysis with AI, I do one step of analysis and ask AI to display intermediate results so I can see if all is going in good direction and there are no hallucinations, additionally I have follow-up prompts for AI to do results verification. If all looks good, then I continue to the next step.

I don't like situation when I ask AI to do all code changes, or all article, or all data analysis in one pass with one prompt. It is simply impossible to check if AI is correct and results are not satisfactory. You can easily see this when asking AI to write a deep article with one prompt - you clearly see that it doesn't reflect your thoughts.

Maybe step-by-step is the approach to use AI and not feel dumber.