I Cancelled My ChatGPT Subscription

I cancelled my ChatGPT Plus subscription last month. Not because the product got worse — it's genuinely impressive. But because I noticed something uncomfortable about how I was using it.

Every time I hit a wall — a difficult paragraph, a tricky code problem, a decision I wasn't sure about — my first instinct had become to open a new chat. The friction of thinking through problems myself was decreasing. The friction of just asking an AI was basically zero.

For certain tasks, this is fine. Boilerplate code, formatting, quick lookups. But for the work that actually requires building a mental model — understanding a new system, designing an architecture, writing something with real point of view — outsourcing the struggle outsources the learning.

I'm not anti-AI. I use these tools constantly and teach about them. But I think there's a real risk that the convenience of LLMs trains people (myself included) out of the tolerance for struggle that genuine expertise requires.

The best way I've found to use AI tools is to use them after you've already formed an opinion, not before. Generate something, then compare it to your instinct. That way you're developing taste and judgment alongside the output.

I resubscribed two weeks later. But I changed how I use it.