Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains?(technologyreview.com)

Stopped using Figma's AI suggestions for initial wireframes after catching myself accepting 4 out of 5 layouts without questioning the underlying user flow. Now I sketch on paper for the first 30 minutes of any new feature, then open the laptop, and my rework rate dropped maybe 40%.

Yeah, the dependency creeps in faster than you notice. After we put Fin on tier-1 tickets, three of my agents stopped drafting replies from scratch and now ping me asking what to do when the bot misroutes a refund case.

offloading retrieval is fine, offloading the framing is where atrophy starts

Caught myself last week opening Claude to name a Figma frame. Three words. I just sat there for twenty seconds waiting on a response instead of typing "settings-modal-empty" like a normal person. Now I keep a sticky note on my monitor that says "ask yourself first, then the bot," and my naming has gotten faster again.

Ran a small experiment with my 9th grade English class last semester. Twelve kids drafted essays with Claude in the loop, thirteen wrote longhand first then revised on laptops. The chatbot group's thesis statements were tighter on average, but when I gave a pop quiz two weeks later asking them to summarize their own arguments, the longhand group remembered specifics and the chatbot group mostly recalled the topic. Sample size is tiny and I'm not drawing conclusions, but it changed how I structure the assignment now.

half my team narrates every decision to claude now and calls it thinking

hand-rolling prompts all day and i can't write a grocery list without three drafts now

three rounds of edits now feel like outsourcing my own judgment