A couple months back, I heard an interesting perspective on two ways of moving through the world: surfing and diving.
Surfing is broad. When you find the current and rides the waves, it feels smooth. You can cover a lot of water and watch the horizon. There’s a satisfying sensation of moving quickly while taking in a lot at once.
There is a seductive confidence to surfing. From above, you perceive a vast amount of ocean. You can describe the general outline of things and recognize patterns. It’s easier to get oriented relative to the beach surroundings.
But the downside is the surface gives you a particular kind of knowledge that, while wide, fast, and useful, is also thin. You go where you are carried, always somewhat at the mercy of the wave and at risk of being knocked off.
In contrast, diving is below the waves, fully immersed in that world. You are exploring inside the thing itself. Good diving is controlled exploration. It requires focus, curiosity, and determination to keep going deeper.
This week the analogy came back into my mind because I saw someone wonder whether six months of using Claude Code had made them less sharp.
I recognize this feeling, but I’m not convinced AI is making us less sharp. I think what’s more likely happening is AI is training us to surf when we used to dive.
Using AI is like surfing. If you’ve used an LLM as a thought partner then you’ve experienced how incredibly easy it makes it to grasp almost any subject at surface level. It’s the Will Hunting of experiencing the depths of curiosity: instant access to an absurd range of knowledge without having to spend years accumulating it.
I think there are plenty of general knowledge questions for which skimming is enough.
Why does this work that way?
What are people disagreeing about?
What vocabulary do I need before I can follow the conversation?
What is another perspective that would help me orient?
I want AI for these questions. On the other hand there are other questions that feel more important to become immersed in. If I found myself handing these over too quickly, I would worry.
What do I believe?
What am I assuming?
What would I believe if the conventional explanation turned out to be wrong?
Why does this matter to my context?
These feel like diving questions. Sometimes you want to let an idea push back on you. If my beliefs started to be shaped by my view from the surface, I think it could feel a lot like like I was becoming less sharp.
Surfing runs on compression
As I’ve written about before in the context of fast and slow thinking, AI often gives us the appearance of deep thought without requiring us to do the deep thinking ourselves. Surfing ideas with AI has value because it runs on compression.
Compression is how we move quickly through complexity. AI use stereotypes, conventional wisdom, pattern recognition, analogies, and three-noun Oxford-comma descriptions of things to get our bearings. (Yes, I used an Oxford comma. My mom was an English professor. You won’t convince me it’s not the best way to write.)
The problem with too much information surfing is that compression, by it’s definition, throws something away. It strips out nuanced details, history, and texture without providing notions of lived experience that depth turns into understanding. AI provides you with an average the averages and make them readable. It will give you the clean version of anything.
If I am trying to learn a new concept outside my field or about a historical moment, for example, then I will be extremely grateful for the surface level and AI’s surfer guidance.
Surfing also compresses the time of thinking into flashes of experience. You ask. It answers. You nod. The idea feels handled. The ability to go deep requires time commitment and the curiosity to stay under the water exploring.
Fluency can feel a lot like understanding, but it isn’t
Sometimes I wonder why. Why dive anymore?
If I can become conversationally fluent in something completely foreign in minutes, why choose the slower path? Why read the source material? Why struggle through the argument myself? I think to myself, maybe the future belongs to people who can skim intelligently, synthesize quickly, and move on.
I half-believe that. But then I think about the parts of thinking that are not about legibility.
There is a deeply human satisfaction that Braeden’s tweet reminds me of in diving down a rabbit hole of question to answer to more questions and paths. That process is tedious and time-consuming yet so central to human nature and the pursuit of knowledge. And that winding path is usually where deep understanding starts.
The problem gets more serious when fluency creates authority. Knowing the vocabulary of a domain can make someone feel qualified to overrule the people who have spent years learning its exceptions. There are plenty of examples of decision makers with surface level experience making choices based on assumptions because they believed their understanding of the theory was better than others’ experience. Many ended badly. The common problem is the confidence that can come from knowing enough to make the situation feel simpler than it actually is.
For a harmless example, I recently accidentally automated one of my ways of diving: I leaned heavily on AI to write blog posts. II built an agent skill that analyzes my written voice so all I have to do is feed it a topic and get back a generated post that is publishable with very little editing.
But I write to explore ideas for myself more than anything. Writing is often my excuse to be a Diver.
But I started to realize that, even if I liked the way AI articulated my ideas as articles better than my own words, I’m only surfing. I don’t get the benefots of thinking deeply that I wanted.
AI can be scuba gear
I want to learn new terrain. I want tools that broaden my horizons. I want faster maps, better translation, more ways into unfamiliar material. I use AI to start dives I might not have attempted otherwise.
And in that sense, AI can be like scuba gear to extend range of ideas and how effective we can dive deeply into something.
But at the same time, it should not be deciding where we dive in and what questions to hone in on. We should still be the ones using our curiosity to lead the way to deeper focus.
If you spend hours exploring an idea with AI while you are the passive participant, you’re still surfing. By the end, you may know a tremendous amount, but you probably won’t have developed the same opinions about what you learned as you would have if you were directing the exploration yourself.
My evolving opinion is that AI does not, by default, make us less sharp or capable, but it does make it easier for curiosity to be satisfied at the surface and for us to be more content spending less time going deep.
Keeping the Ability to Go Under
We are going to surf more. There are too many things available to understand and too little reason to investigate most of them deeply. From my view It would be strange to treat diving as the default response to every interesting thing.
So if surfing seems inevitable and not necessary an anti-pattern to fight against, for me, the emerging intellectual skill is recognizing when the surface is no longer enough. If I start to feel like Braeden mentions, like I’m feeling less sharp or losing my edge, it might be time to do more diving.
We now have a way to skim across more knowledge than any person could previously imagine. Having generalist breadth has always been, and will continue to be, a valuable commodity. There is no virtue in making every act of learning harder than it needs to be.
But there is a different satisfaction in staying somewhere long enough for the easy categories to stop working. That is what I want to protect.
I want the range that comes from surfing. I also want to keep learning how to dive.