The Skills I'm Willing to Let AI Have

I have dyslexic tendencies, and lately I’ve stopped worrying about my spelling. I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a good thing.

How I actually type

Letters come out of order. And there’s one quirk I’ve had for as long as I can remember: the first letter of the next word drifts back onto the one before it. “Write letters” comes out as something like “writel etters”. Most of the time I don’t see it. My eyes read what I meant, not what I typed.

For years that made writing two jobs. First getting the thought out, then going back over every line hunting for mistakes I couldn’t see. The second job was the one that wore me down, and it often ate the energy that should have gone into the first.

What the model sees

Then LLMs came along, and the second job mostly disappeared.

The reason is in how they read. A language model doesn’t check words against a dictionary. It splits text into tokens, chunks that can be a whole word, part of a word, or a single character. A common word spelled correctly is usually a single token. “writel etters” isn’t anyone’s vocabulary, so it gets chopped into a handful of odd fragments.

What surprised me is that this doesn’t break anything. The model has learned from enormous amounts of messy human text, typos included, and it reads every fragment in the context of everything around it. Strange pieces inside a sentence that makes sense still add up to “write letters”. It doesn’t need my letters in the right order. It needs enough of the pattern to work out what I meant, and it usually does.

For the first time, something reads me the way I read myself: by meaning, not by spelling.

What I stopped doing

That’s a real kind of freedom. I can type fast and badly and still be understood. The ideas get out before the letters can trip them up.

But I noticed something. I’ve stopped going back. The mistakes haven’t gone anywhere. I just don’t have to fix them anymore. Why bother, when the model will figure it out?

That leaves me with a question I can’t shake: am I using AI to get past a limitation, or am I quietly handing over a skill I should still be building?

From the inside, those two feel exactly the same.

Where I’m drawing the line

Spelling is where it starts, not where it stops. It’s the low-stakes skill, the one where letting go clearly helps. The risk is that the same habit, “the model will figure it out”, spreads to the skills that do matter: organising a thought, structuring an argument, writing a paragraph that holds together. Follow that far enough and you end up someone who can’t write, or think something through, without a model in the loop. I don’t want to become that person.

So I’m splitting it. The model can keep reading through my typos, and I’m grateful that it does. But I’m going to start doing the second job again: rereading what I write, catching my own mistakes, fixing them myself, even when nobody else needs me to. Not to compete with AI, but because I don’t want to forget how to communicate without it.

Which skills are you letting AI have, and did you choose them on purpose?

I’d love to hear your take. Find me on Twitter at @niksmac_ and share your thoughts.