AI is getting so good now (at the end of 2025) that I now have a new, primary recommendation going into 2026:

Think very carefully about where you get help from AI.

I think of it as Job vs. Gym.

• If we're working a manual labor job, it's fine to have AI lift heavy things for us because the actual goal is to move the thing, not to lift it.
• This is the exact opposite of going to the gym, where the goal is to lift the weight, not to move it.

In the first case we just want the output, and in the second the whole point is to do the work ourselves.

Going forward, and especially as AI improves, it's critical that we don't confuse these two things.

Step 1 is figuring out which are which for you.

For me, any sort of:

• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Creating arguments for or against a given position
• Etc.

...are all Gym tasks.

These are core to my how I see myself, and I want to not only maintain my skills with doing these things, but I want to get better at them over time.

That beign true, because my work is largely cognitive, and the whole point of AI is to magnify my ability to do that work, I inevitably will use AI to do many of these Gym tasks in a given day/week/year.

I've started building a system into my customized AI stack that functions not just as a worker, but also as a tutor.

Currently this takes the form of a weekly session where my Digital Assistant, Kai, can look at all the Gym tasks that he performed for me and can interrogate me on how I think it was done, how I think the code was generated, what I think the architecture was, why I think he made those decisions, etc.

Okay, so over this last week, you had me do x, y, and z.

Now it's time for me to show you how I did it and hit you with questions to ensure that you fully understand what was done and why I made the decisions I did.Kai

From there, we can go into an interactive back-and-forth, getting to first principles all the way down to code-level specifics or whatever.

This is currently done via a Claude Code skill, but I'm experimenting with some other interfaces and interaction modes as well.

So here's what I practically recommend going into 2026 and beyond.

1. Think about once you want to be, as your core identity, in a world where AI can do most things better than us.
2. Take a look at all the different skills you want to or need to be good at.
3. Divide those into Job skills and Gym skills.
4. Take note of when you are having AI do Gym work for you.
5. Either reduce that work, if possible, or build a system similar to mine in which you work with your AI to make sure you maintain those muscles.

Keep the robots out of the gym.