On AI Workflows
I do not know how much of my work is genuinely improved by my AI workflow, and how much of it is simply shaped by the fact that everyone now seems expected to have one.
At times, it almost feels like not having an AI workflow is a crime. The productivity industry will not let you live if you do not have some workflow. There is always a new stack, a new prompt library, a new routine, XP waste, tokenmaxxing, etc… After a while, the thing starts feeling like a social expectation.
It reminds me a bit of social media. For millennials growing up, we were always supposed to have some sort of social media. You had to be on something to keep up. There was always a feeling that everyone else was there, so you should be too. AI is beginning to carry a similar pressure, only this time the demand is not to be visible, but to be optimised.
Hands down I do think there is a real place for an AI workflow if it is genuinely useful. I am not interested in pretending otherwise. But it is not always clear what 'useful' really means. Is it 'useful' because it helps you think better? Or is it 'useful' because it helps you write an email in the most elegant way? That is where I get stuck.
Sometimes it feels like the goal is no longer to think well, but to think right. Yet, a lot of thinking happens awkwardly. That untidy first draft is not a flaw in the process; it is often the process itself. If AI is implemented too early, it can iron out the very friction that forces a person to think what they actually mean.
There is some research sitting underneath this unease. Long before generative AI, work on the 'Google effect' argued that the internet had already become a kind of external or transactive memory, where knowing where to find something could matter more than knowing the thing itself [1]. More recent work on cognitive offloading suggests that AI may intensify that tendency by moving beyond knowledge storage into suggestions, drafting, and even predictions [2].
What unsettles me more is not the outsourcing by itself, but the possibility that it becomes a habit of mind. AI is becoming something you are supposed to have around you all the time. So I do not think the question is whether one should have an AI workflow. Maybe the real question is whether the workflow still leaves room for one's own thinking.