Picture this: you wake up and you have this weird feeling…but you can’t quite put your finger on it. This feeling of doubt…like you’re struggling to think clearly. Like you’re in a bit of a brain fog.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” you think. Some coffee will clear that right up.

You go about your day. You notice you have an issue with your website. You ask Claude, “My website isn’t displaying my podcast episodes the right way. Can you fix it?” Of course! Claude pinpoints the problem and then asks if you want it to deploy the code for you.

A little later, you need to write an article. You ask Claude, “Based on my 10 best-performing articles, what should I write about next?” Claude gives you a list of pretty good ideas, then asks if you want it to draft one of them for you.

After a meeting with some people in your mastermind group, you realize that you need a better product. So you ask Claude, “Based on what you know about me, my area of expertise, and what I’m currently selling, can you come up with something new for me to sell?” Claude comes up with a great idea for a digital product, then asks if you want it to create the outline or slides for it.

At the end of the day, you’re talking to your partner. “How was your day? What did you do?” And that’s when the feeling solidifies: you have a vague idea of what you’ve checked off your list…but you don’t really feel like you’ve done anything.

…so you ask Claude.

How are YOU Feeling?

You probably had 1 of 2 reactions to that story: deep resonance, as I did recently. Or complete skepticism.

If you had that first reaction, you’re ready to hear this. If you had the second, you’re not. But hopefully I’ve planted a seed. Come back when you’re ready.

Or maybe there’s a 3rd option; you already have a good handle on your use of AI, and you don’t need this. I thought I did, until I tried Claude Max. It’s pretty impressive, but a few days in, I had this sinking feeling. The same one I had last year, when I was asking regular old Claude everything.

“Am I asking AI to do too much for me?”

When AI Does Too Much For Us, Our Brain Atrophies

My friend and I were at an event recently where we talked, among other things, about how too many people are experiencing AI Brain Rot. Where they literally can’t do anything without asking AI first.

You might think it won’t happen to you. And maybe it won’t. I don’t know you. But here’s what I’ve seen solopreneurs use it for over the past few months:

1. Coming up with, writing, and publishing articles on their behalf
2. Using it to write responses to people seeking their advice
3. “Thinking” of questions they should ask their audience
4. Having it come up with questions they should ask during webinars and workshops
5. Thinking of and creating products
6. Using it to “have a conversation” with deceased relatives¹

You’ve probably heard that your brain is a muscle. It’s not. But it is true that if you don’t use it, you lose it. By having AI do more thinking for you than you do for yourself, you will lose the ability to think critically…and to do anything well.

We’re all different; we have different thresholds, skills, and standards. But I want to share with you what I think are 3 warning signs that you’re experiencing AI brain rot.

You Can’t Think About Something for More Than 5 Minutes Before Running to an LLM for “Advice”

This is the first and biggest. During a talk I gave at Podfest 2026, someone asked me how to know if you rely on AI too much. This was my answer: if you can’t think about something for more than 5 minutes without going to AI, you rely on it too much.

It seems like we’re being much more productive, but the opposite is happening: we’re doing things with no direction. That’s a poison pill for solopreneur systems. But there’s something even worse happening.

If I were to put it more extremely, I would say it’s just like any other chemical dependency: you don’t feel like you can function without it².

We need to be able to sit in problems and think about them. Not just for a few minutes. For 20, 30, 60. Maybe more. This is an exercise we should practice regularly.

Running to AI at the first sign of friction, coupled with our increasing inability to be bored, is having a terrible effect on our collective ability to think critically.

The next time you have to solve a problem (what article to write, some part of your customer journey, how to talk to your kids about something), I want you to leave your phone in a different room, take out a pen and paper, and just spend 20 minutes thinking about it.

You’re Not Talking to the People Who Matter

The second is that you’re letting AI act as a proxy for talking to actual people: customers, stakeholders, business partners, or mastermind members.

We need to remember that AI is a massive word calculator. It’s really advanced autocomplete. It’s the best contextual search we have. It is not human.

When you ask LLMs something and then treat it as a problem your audience has, you’re not serving your audience. You’re serving yourself. Instead, take out the old pen and paper and write down 5 questions you have for your audience, customers, stakeholders, etc.

Then actually email those people those questions. Create a survey or a poll. Get real feedback. Have actual calls with people. I promise you can use an LLM after that to:

1. Find primary sources on the problems they have
2. Summarize and process the data you’ve gathered
3. Show you interesting data points

Doing it later is important because then you’re not getting fictional analysis. You’re doing it with real data, from real people — which is what you have to do, unless the LLM is your target customer.

You Have No Skin in the Game

The final reason might be the most tangibly impactful: you have no skin in the game. And the reasoning is simple: you didn’t actually come up with it, so you care less.

It’s like a poker game without real money, or a scrimmage game where you’re not keeping score. There’s nothing to play for. When we don’t have something driving us, we’re less likely to commit.

How does this shake out with AI? Well, let’s say you have it come up with a content strategy. You’ve trained it on your YouTube channel, told it what works and what you want to do, and it comes up with 20 ideas for you to start with. But creating videos is a heavy lift. And sure, it gives you a title and maybe a synopsis, but you’re not clear on how to execute this.

Because it’s something else’s idea. I fell into this exact trap. I thought it was great that it could analyze my content — everything on my podcast, YouTube channel, blog, and newsletter. But then instead of just telling me the insights, it came up with this deep plan that focused too much on a single aspect.

Because the ‘work’ was already done, I decided to give it a try…but I realized I didn’t care about most of what it came up with. So instead, I broke out a notebook, and wrote down 50 of my own ideas.

Then I used the LLM to compare the ideas against what performed well, and picked 10 to start with. Once again: using AI to supplement your thinking with data, not do the thinking for you.

And if you’re worried you’re slipping into the cold embrace of AI brain rot, don’t worry. It’s not too late.

How to Prevent AI Brain Rot

AI brain rot isn’t permanent, and it’s preventable. Here’s what to do.

I think the most important thing you can do is create a set of rules about what you’ll use AI for. I’ll share mine in a minute, but they are all informed by the 5 pillars of my AI Philosophy.

My AI Philosophy

1. Don’t use LLMs for thinking work
2. Don’t refer to what LLMs do as “thinking”
3. Don’t personify LLMs
4. LLMs/AI are computers, and they are best for doing computer things
5. Remember the cardinal rule of programming: computers do exactly what you tell them to do.

With that, here are my rules…

Rule 1: Use the Computer for Things Computers Are Good At

This includes crunching a lot of data, transcribing meetings, processing written notes, and updating apps like Notion and Obsidian with my work, not its work.

We are living in an incredible time where we can literally have the full context of all of our meetings, calls, and conversations at our fingertips. THEN we can have a very smart computer process all of that data for us. This is a great use for AI.

…just remember to take your own notes too.

I will also use it for coding. I have complicated feelings about it, and there are guardrails you need. But it’s very effective at writing code (after all — it’s basically speaking its native language here).

I’ve used it to write simple plugins, web apps, and even an iOS app — something I have no personal experience doing. As a former Software Engineer, I try to be very clear in my requirements, think about how a human will use the software, and test rigorously. But LLMs, especially ones like Claude Code, have gotten really really good at coding over the last year.

Rule 2: Think About the Problem You’re Trying to Solve for at Least 30 Minutes Away From a Computer

When I’m thinking through a problem, I like to either:

1. Go for a walk
2. Write in my notebook at my writing desk or front porch
3. Plan at my whiteboard

The important bit is that you’re not doing it at a place where you can get distracted, or give up and go to the LLM. This will give you time to sit in the problem and come up with your own solution.

It will help you “work out” your brain so it doesn’t atrophy. But I know what you might be thinking: “I log ideas on my phone, and I have the LLM app on my phone too.”

Don’t worry…I have a solution.

Rule 3: Remove It From Your Phone

I know this is a big ask. But much like with social media, always having it on you means you’ll start to use it more as a companion than as a program. You have a random thought and you decide to ask the LLM. You’re struck with inspiration, and you start using the LLM as a “thinking buddy” — a hilarious moniker to me because at that point neither party is actually thinking.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use your phone to help you think through stuff. If I want to take the output from Claude (like analysis of data, for example) with me, I have it save a file to my Obsidian Vault or to Google Drive.

For capturing, I have a completely separate transcription app: Whisper Memos³. That way I can record my thoughts completely and then work with them later. This includes having Claude or some other AI thing summarize it.

The idea here is to remove the temptation of running to it for everything.

So now that you know how to recognize AI Brain, and how to prevent it, what does your life look like?

Fast Forward A Month

You wake up feeling refreshed, and ready to tackle the day. That nagging feeling you had a few weeks ago is gone. You actually feel like you’re doing your best work…that your work days aren’t just a fog of vague prompts and even more vague output.

You notice an issue with your website. You ask Claude to fix it; Claude obliges. It’s very good at writing code because it’s a computer doing a computer thing.

You need to write an article. You ask Claude to analyze your website and YouTube analytics to show you the best-performing articles. Then you ask it to summarize 10 customer research calls you had with actual people to find the objections they had, and cross-reference them with your articles. You take that data and write out 20 article ideas. You pick your favorite and get to work.

The product that Claude came up with last month is a dud. So, using those saved customer research documents, as well as comments on your content and emails from your audience, you ask Claude to find the problems your potential customers are saying they’re having, using actual quotes from the source material.

Claude puts it all in a document, which you convert to audio; you go for a walk, listening to it and thinking through how you can best serve your audience.

At the end of the day, you talk to your partner. They ask, “So, what did you do today?” Unlike last month, you have the answers. You came up with a bunch of article ideas and wrote one. You came up with a product that should actually solve a problem for your customers; now you’re working on a 3-question survey to get feedback on it.

This time, you don’t need to ask Claude what “you” did, because you did the actual work of running a one-person business. And you left the computer stuff to the computer.

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1. Look. I know we all grieve in different ways. But part of the grieving process is acceptance. My gut is that this will prolong the grieving process (or at least, prevent you from fully accepting reality), and I spoke to a couple of psychologists who agree. ↩
2. We are already seeing this. People who say, “Oh, my AI is down; I guess that’s a sign I should take a break.” I take breaks when I want, and when AI goes down, I keep working. ↩
3. Though, full disclosure, AudioPen just revamped their app and I’m a lifetime member of that, so I’m stoked to try it out. ↩