Posts tagged "cyborg-writing"

„Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” — Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos (1803)

(Near is, / and difficult to grasp, the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also.)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled Thinking with Claude: why Cyborg writing works better than Centaur writing. In the LinkedIn comments, a reader named Christopher pushed back: Leaning on AI to help me write, he argued, was training my brain to “surrender executive function to external sources.” Examples: freed prisoners overwhelmed by everyday choices, ex-military struggling with civilian life, people leaving long-term institutional care. The source doesn’t matter, he wrote. The offloading pattern is the same.

While my initial answer was along the lines of “using your executive function is a choice”, I think it’s not that simple, after all, and I owe Christopher a real answer. In fact, his comment pushed me into a weeks-long thinking journey, during which I looked for research, came across interesting related articles, and reflected a lot on my own AI use. I also jammed with Claude, and yes: I used the very tool Christopher warned me about to think harder about his warning. We’ll get to that contradiction later.

Last month I sat down with Cris Roata to record an episode of her podcast, Catching More Green Lights in Life. It went live today! Cris asked me what I tell people who are afraid of AI, and I gave the answer I usually give: treat it like an intern, train it patiently, expect the first attempts to be…

In February this year, I wrote about why I stopped trying to engineer prompts and started delegating intent instead. That post argued the skill of working with AI is managerial, not technical. I still think that’s right. But over the last couple months I’ve noticed something else: even with good del…