I’ve been thinking about the things we forget. The skills that fade when we stop using them.
If you don’t use a muscle, it atrophies. That’s obvious with physical strength, but it happens with everything. Children learning language can hear and reproduce sounds from virtually any language. As we grow older, we lose that ability. Certain sounds become harder to hear, harder to make. Learning new languages gets more difficult.
The question I keep coming back to: what atrophies when AI does the work we used to do ourselves?
Things We Stopped Needing to Know
I remember driving cars with carburetors. You had to pay attention to fuel quality. Poor gas would affect how the engine ran. In Brazil, when it was cold, cars running on ethanol wouldn’t start properly. You had to inject a little gasoline to get the engine going. That went away with fuel injection.
I also remember planning my day to let the engine warm up for a while before driving to work. I haven’t thought about that in years.
Then there’s the cassette tape era. I couldn’t carry all my music with me. I was limited to whatever tapes fit in my backpack. And I was at the mercy of the battery. As it faded, the tape would play more and more slowly, shifting the pitch of every song downward, little by little.
Hearing What Was Always There
What I remember most vividly is when one earbud on my cheap Walkman stopped working. Bands like Iron Maiden or Slayer had their guitarists panned all the way left and right. With one channel gone, I could only hear one guitar.
Songs I had listened to hundreds of times suddenly sounded completely different. Something was missing, yes. But the absence of one guitar forced me to hear the other guitar in a new way. Licks and notes that were always there, always part of the mix, suddenly stood out. They weren’t buried anymore.
The absence of something I had taken for granted gave me an appreciation for something that had always been there.
A similar thing happens when I listen to songs with harmonies through a different sound system. Different frequency ranges get highlighted, and suddenly, I hear vocal harmonies I never realized were present. Same song, completely different experience.
The Mystery That Built the Skill
I heard a YouTuber talk about how innovators like Eddie Van Halen came up before YouTube. If you wanted to learn to play like those guys, you had to learn by ear. You had to develop your listening skills and musical intuition just to approximate what you were hearing.
You’d get it close but never exactly right. And in the process, through your imperfections, you’d make it your own.
Now, you can pull up a video and immediately see exactly where on the neck the player’s fingers are, what guitar they’re using, and what technique they’re applying. The mystery is gone, and with it, some of the development.
Choosing Which Friction to Keep
For the last six months or more, almost 100% of the code I’ve produced, I didn’t write by hand. It was generated under my guidance and codified from the patterns and practices I’ve developed in projects.
Right now, I could sit down and write code myself. But I know I’d be rusty.
And personally, I’m okay with that. What resonates with me is solving people’s problems, not figuring out the implementation syntax. If the code is produced to a high standard, I don’t need to be the one typing it.
But what else?
I’ve been deliberate about noticing friction in what I do and asking, “Is this friction something I enjoy working through?” If yes, I’ll keep it, even if it takes longer. That’s the friction that builds the muscles I want to keep strong.
For the friction I don’t enjoy, I’ll offload it responsibly to AI so I can stay focused on the work that matters to me.
The Muscles That Matter
What I do need to watch is the things I do not want to atrophy: the critical-thinking muscles, judgment, and reasoning.
I don’t want AI doing my thinking for me. I want it to help me think.
There’s a difference, and it matters.
When one channel of my Walkman stopped working, I didn’t lose the music. I heard it differently. I heard things that were always there but buried in the mix.
Maybe that’s the real question. Not what we’re losing, but what we’re choosing to hear more clearly.
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