I am getting smarter and dumber at the same time thanks to LLMs.

I’ve been forcing myself to spend at least an hour every day chatting with LLMs for the last few months.

Not the way most people do it though. I don’t treat ChatGPT like a therapist. I don’t use it to process my personal life. I definitely don’t feed it prompts like “analyse my chat history and tell me who I am.” I have zero interest in being psychoanalysed by a chatbot.

And I also know that someday OpenAI is going to run ads. And the last thing I want is to start seeing targeted offers based on my deepest vulnerabilities.

Where LLMs truly shine for me is in high level thinking. Today I was analysing the business model of some late stage Indian startups, and the back and forth with ChatGPT genuinely sharpened my own frameworks. It’s like having a sparring partner who never gets tired and always shows up ready to challenge your assumptions.


Same with technical projects. I’ve used it to understand complex workflows, even set it up to question me until my thinking got clearer. That kind of Socratic prompting has been huge for improving how I reason through architecture and implementation.
 I’m probably getting dumber at the basics though.

I barely type anymore. Everything is a thought dump through voice to text. I rely on LLMs to rewrite things so much that even this reflection you’re reading is rewritten by a Editor GPT and then passed through Claude Opus for another round of editing. My default writing muscles are slowly decaying. Sometimes I wonder if I can even write a simple email without AI assistance anymore.

There’s this weird polarity happening. At the high end, I’m getting sharper than ever. My ability to synthesise complex information, spot patterns across industries, and build mental models has improved dramatically. But on the low end, I’m delegating so much that I might forget how to write a basic text like a normal human.

Even my basic whatsapp messages are now being rewritten by ChatGPT.

I think a lot of power users of LLMs are going through this cognitive bifurcation, even if they don’t say it out loud. We’re getting sharper at high level synthesis while atrophying at routine tasks. In my case, it’s showing up as better systems thinking but declining baseline communication hygiene.