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Hey there,
A debate I'm having a lot with friends: is AI making us dumber, or smarter?
Students who can't write essays anymore.
Professionals who can't draft an email without a chatbot.
Knowledge workers automating basic tasks.
Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study surveyed 319 knowledge workers and found that higher confidence in AI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more.
So, basically, depends how you use it. Rather than waiting and seeing if it makes me smarter or dumber, I'm going to take ownership and make sure it makes me smarter.
And share some of the workflows tools that I'm using with you.
Workflow 1: Customized research, delivered to my Kindle
A few weeks ago I set up a pipeline that does this:
- I give Claude topics that I want to learn about (history of Japan, difference between CPUs & GPUs, etc.)
- It writes a 2-3k word web-researched report in markdown (citing sources of course!)
- I ask claude to convert it to a .epub (file that Kindle accepts)
- It emails the .epub to my Send-to-Kindle address (if you have a kindle and haven't used this feature, you should!)
- I read it offline on my Kindle
I didn't totally come up with this myself, was inspired by this post on X, but adapted it to my routine.
It keeps me from getting distracted by reading on Kindle and helps me learn about new topics. It also knows me, so it's written for me, and I ask it to provide book recommendations in case I want to dig deeper into anything.
I'm not outsourcing the reading. I'm outsourcing the writing of a report that didn't exist on something I wanted to learn.
Workflow 2: An App called Learn Anything
I built a small app in Lovable called Learn Anything. It's a very early quickly whipped up prototype. The flow:
- Tell it what you want to learn
- It generates a lesson plan, which you can edit
- You go through each lesson
- You have checkpoints to demonstrate understanding via conversation with AI
That last step is the whole point. There's an old idea that you only really know something if you can explain it to someone else. Teaching is the comprehension test.
Try these out and let me know what you think!
Shaalin