Since 2024, I’ve been using AI to help me finish my projects of all kinds: whether they involve coding, academic writing, preparing seminars, or other tasks that I felt were stealing my time away from what mattered. The AI was genuinely useful for getting things started and helping me finish more things in less time.
Yet, there was an effect on myself that I only realized about a year later: I stopped learning from these projects, and I simultaneously stopped caring about them.
AI as a Joy Vampire
There was no joy in working on these projects once I started to make them mostly with AI. I felt increasingly out of the loop, more like a “meat proxy” as Niklas Gruhn explains it. I was becoming a proxy between the AI and the person or project I needed to deliver something to. In many cases, I felt like I could’ve been removed from the process entirely and the work would’ve gotten done faster.
“If there’s no joy in making a project, why am I still doing it?”
That thought hovered over me every time I implemented a new feature, started a new project, or tried to brainstorm something new. I couldn’t help but feel useless. I had delegated all of my agency over something that I originally cared about to an AI.
Eventually, every project started to feel like an obligation that I should finish, just for the sake of finishing it.
The Loss of Competency and Confidence
Throughout 2025, I slowly realized that I had stopped learning about new topics, and had even begun forgetting things that I had already learned.
To me, this was the worst consequence. It happened quietly, while also making the work itself less enjoyable. I became increasingly reliant on the AI. Each time that I let it make decisions, implementations, and even small things that I could do, my knowledge would actually shrunk and would not improve.
My confidence evaporated, and with it went my competency to make new things. I felt trapped, with no way out of a cell that I put myself into willingly.
Taking Back Control
This year, I decided to try something else: for every project took on for learning or for the simple joy of creating, I would use as little AI as possible. This wasn’t an easy task though, as I had to train myself to actively stop opening ChatGPT for every small annoyance that I ran into.
Now, when I start a new project, I try to build most, if not all, of it myself. When I do use AI, it should help me figure out the issues and act as a mentor, instead of solving things by itself.
I’m slowly making progress back to where my knowledge was before I started being over reliant on AI, and I genuinely feel that I can finish smaller projects by myself without turning to an AI to make the work for me.