Brain Rot or Brain Boost? With AI the Choice Is Yours

How I turned AI into an excellent mentor.

Recently, I’ve been wondering if it’s even possible to spend more time chatting with artificial intelligence than I do.

I use it for everything: fixing household things, writing, self-reflection, note-taking, coding, generating client proposals, and completing projects for clients that are entirely beyond my skillset.

Sometimes I ask AI to handle tasks I already know how to do, simply because they're tedious and mechanical. It saves me a lot of time I can use for higher level, and more satisfying, tasks.

Other times, I let AI think for me—and that's a risk.

From great power comes great responsibility

My brain, my thinking ability, my creativity, my problem-solving—these are parts of me I'm most proud of. And I've worked hard, day in and day out, throughout my life, to keep them as sharp as possible.

If I stop using them, they wither, like every skill.

I need to stretch my brain to keep making good decisions in an ever-changing, ever-more-complex world.

I can't delegate all thinking. What happens the day I don’t have my phone, can’t afford ChatGPT anymore, or my internet connection fails? What happens when I use AI for tasks I can't do myself—like writing code on a platform I don't know in a language I've never used—and things stop working or need updating?

Surrendering control like this feels dangerous.

It's like handing a critical area of your business over to a new specialized hire who can do things you can't, and trusting them blindly from day one without checking their work.

Still, I won’t let these doubts rob me of AI's opportunities.

Capable of so much more

On my Italian YouTube channel, I talk about automations for small businesses. I constantly get new emails asking "Can my process be automated?" My answer is always "Yes, the limit is only how much you want to spend developing the automation".

I can safely say it: by combining the right prompts and models with the skills I developed over time (like lateral thinking and problem solving), I've been able to solve any problem any client throws at me.

So, with AI I'm not only capable of doing more in the sense that it takes care of the tedious tasks. But also in the sense that I can do things I shouldn't be able to do without days of learning and training.

How I prevent brain rot, while expanding my abilities

The worst mindset when working is AI is "Tell me what to do, and I'll do it". Hallucinations are becoming less and less of a problem, so you can trust AI's suggestions. But you can't turn into a mindless executor. Exactly like you can't afford to do at work.

The right mindset is always asking yourself "What am I doing here? And why?" Exactly what you should ask yourself at work. 😉

With the passive mindset, brain rot is guaranteed. And at a certain point, you won't even be able to complete complex tasks. They usually have multiple possible solutions, AI can provide them, but you need to choose the right one for the situation.

This is instead how I apply the active mindset, keeping my critical thinking always on:

• First, I ask the most advanced model available to solve my problem. These days, it's a reasoning model like o3 or o3-pro on ChatGPT.

• I question the solution, based on my knowledge. Or I ask the AI to explain the steps I don't understand. At this phase I often ask "Why are you doing this this way and not this other way?"

• When the solution looks feasible and optimal, I start implementing. I'm constantly going back to ChatGPT to ask for more details, or to fix something that's not working as expected.

• During the implementation process, I often ask "Why didn't this work?" or "Why are you suggesting this fix?" This lets me learn how to create better prompts. But also different techniques to solve different nuances of the same problem.

• When I’m done, I ask AI to explain or summarize the solution and why it works. This way I can paste it into my note-taking tool.

Of course, it makes sense to save your learnings throughout the process. This usually is the weakest spot. Who has time to document everything while new clients keep knocking?

I use AI for this, too, of course! I dictate what I learned into VoiceNotes and let the AI transcribe them. I usually do it on a walk, so it doesn't eat into my work time.

Let AI help you expand yourself

Today’s AI doesn't truly think, but simulates thinking by drawing from an endless archive of human knowledge.

Using the most advanced models, like Claude from Opus or ChatGPT-3, you can count on sophisticated, near-hallucination-free responses.

When AI shares a conclusion and explains why, it's offering the collective thinking of countless others who faced similar issues. To be enriched by this you just have to keep quesioning and taking notes.

It's truly like standing on the shoulders of giants.

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