In his essay (ok, Substack) “The defense against slop and brainrot“, Paul Jun describes a writing exercise lifted from Hunter S. Thompson: He’d grind away through writer’s block, typing The Great Gatzby word-for-word until,

By the final page, something had shifted—I could sense how clean sentences snap into place, the way a pianist’s fingers know where middle C lives without looking.

He continues on this path, comparing cognitive workload to resistance training:

When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn’t do, a pattern your neurons didn’t carve deeper.

His thesis is that a barely literate country To borrow from Chat: He’s not just writing—he’s dropping knowledge bombs. Highlights:

Anyone can look capable; fewer people can be capable.

When everyone else’s focus fragments, mine compounds.

If you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can’t, AI just amplifies your mistakes.

The people who skipped the fundamentals become dependent on tools they don’t understand, producing work they can’t evaluate, making decisions based on outputs they can’t verify.

Absolutely worth reading, and maybe transcribing, whenever you’re tempted to take the path of least resistance.