There is a world of difference between a tool that assists you and one that you offload your thinking to. A calendar app that turns “Meet Joe at 2pm Thursday” to an actual event in your calendar isn’t offloading anything, that’s just software doing its job well. An app that decides what you should be doing today and reshuffles your tasks to fit is offloading, whether it calls itself an AI-assistant or not. One is where you do the thinking, the second takes over your thinking.
I read something earlier today, someone asking why anyone would want an AI-free productivity system, and it annoyed me enough that i had to sit with why.
The honest answer is i don’t want AI running my productivity tools, my PKMS, or even my blog. I want to be the one coming up with the ideas, scheduling my own calendar, adding my own todos and checking them off myself. I don’t think AI should be doing this for us at all, and all these shitty vibe-coded apps out there that are thrown together in a few hours aren’t going to make anyone more productive just by letting AI do things for them.
It’s not just about privacy, or control, or even reliability on their own. It’s the sum of all of it. An LLM you don’t control could go down any day and has no guarantee of being around next year or even four years from now. When that foundation isn’t something you can rely on, it is certain to fall apart and stop working. That’s why we can’t rely on AI to do our productivity for us. There’s nothing wrong with AI, or with AI built into apps generally. But when it comes to productivity, to writing, to scheduling and tasks, these are things you should control and do yourself.
The vast majority of apps and tools don’t need AI at all. They need to be better designed, with better frameworks and better standards for how apps connect and work with each other instead of walling each other off.
What’s at stake here isn’t just a matter of preference, it’s whether you retain control of your thinking and doing. With these tools, you start to give over slowly and quietly. One rescheduling and one auto-sorted inbox at a time. Eventually, it’s no longer just your calendar or notes.
It’s become a record of what a model decided for you.