AI took the effort. Watch what goes with it.

Effort used to be a filter. You didn't notice it working, but it was. When a task was going to cost you three hours, you asked, quietly and automatically, whether it was worth three hours. Half the time the honest answer was no, and you didn't do it. The cost was doing the deciding for you.

AI is removing that cost. Which is the point, and also the problem.

When everything is cheap, you do everything

With the friction gone, the filter goes with it. The task now costs you a sentence, so you fire it off without the quiet worth-it question. And you do ten of those. None of them were worth doing before. They're not worth doing now. They just feel like work, because something came back.

That's the first trap, and it's the small one. You end up busier and pointed at nothing in particular, because the thing that used to keep you pointed was the effort you're now proud of having eliminated.

The bigger one: outsourcing the part that was yours

The second trap costs more. When the model will happily produce a decision, it's very easy to let it. Which lever to pull. What to build. Which of two directions is actually yours. They feel like tasks you can hand off, because the output looks like the output of a task.

They're not tasks. They're judgment, and judgment was the part you were being paid for. Hand it over because deciding is hard and the model makes it easy, and you've automated away the one thing that added value while keeping all the things that didn't.

I catch myself doing it. Anyone honest does. The tool is good enough now that the line between "help me think" and "think for me" is genuinely hard to feel in the moment.

The discipline

So the skill AI actually demands isn't prompting. It's deciding, on purpose, what stays yours. Use it to strip the effort out of the work that doesn't need your judgment, and refuse to let it strip the effort out of the work that does. That line sits in a different place for everyone, and finding it is itself a judgment call. Which is rather the point.

The people who get this right won't be the ones who used AI the most. They'll be the ones who were deliberate about the short list of things they kept doing the hard way.