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When AI Feels Like Extra Work

 I had a realization this week: I barely opened my LLM this week, and for the first time in months, I felt like I was falling behind.

In the past few months I have been surrounded by the narrative that AI is the Great Accelerator. Our leadership team asks about it, our engineers are experimenting with it, and my LinkedIn feed is a constant stream of people highlighting how they’ve been using AI to automate their entire existence.

And yet this week I didn’t have any new AI wins. I did a lot of things the old way - tough 1-1 conversations, frustrating planning meetings, dealing with misalignments, and reacting to new fire drills. What strikes me is I have a distinct feeling of AI related guilt. I did use AI - it helped me with my 1-1s, it helped me pull together an annual review for someone - it probably saved me 3 or 4 hours this week alone. But I still found myself wondering: Should I be prompting this? Am I falling behind because I’m doing the heavy lifting myself? Is my refusal to use a tool a sign of "dinosaur syndrome," or is it actually a preservation of quality?



The Friction of "Efficiency"

Leading a top-tier org is like driving an F1 car at 200 mph: we know that pulling into the 'AI pit stop' to swap our manual tires for automated ones will make us faster in the long run. But when you’re defending a lead in your business, every second in the pits feels like a risk. We’re often choosing to stay on fading, manual tires just to keep our position on the track, fearing that the time it takes to 'upgrade' will cost us the race.

When I have 20 minutes between back-to-back meetings to solve a crisis, I have two choices:

  1. Use my 20 years of experience to pattern-match and write the solution. (Time: 15 mins).

  2. Contextualize the problem, sanitize the sensitive data, craft the prompt, review the output, realize it missed the cultural nuance of my specific org, and then edit it. (Time: 25 mins).

Right now, for the most complex parts of our jobs - the "human" parts - the AI path often feels like the prompting tax, not a shortcut.

Knowing When Not to Prompt

The conversation for Engineering Managers shouldn't just be about how to use AI but about when to use AI. If I use AI to write a performance review or a sensitive email to a struggling peer, I might save ten minutes, but I risk losing the "soul" of the message. If I use it to brainstorm technical architecture, I might get a standard industry answer, but miss the brilliance that my senior staff would provide.

However, the guilt persists because we know that the "AI Path" only gets faster if we keep walking it. Every time I choose the old way because I’m in a rush, I am technically delaying my own evolution.

This week, I’m reflecting on where that line sits.

  • Are we avoiding AI because the tools aren't ready for the nuance we need?

  • Or are we avoiding it because we are addicted to the "ego-hit" of solving hard problems ourselves?

  • Are we opting out due to necessity due to high pressure weeks?

I’d love to hear if others are feeling this guilt. Have you had a "Low-AI" week lately? Did it feel like a failure, or a return to craft?
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