I like challenges like Blaugust. They can be a surprisingly effective way to change a habit or learn something new. Don’t drink alcohol for a month. Write a blog post every day for a month. Make one cartoon every day. Walk 10,000 steps. Learn something new every morning. Whatever you choose, limiting a challenge to a month makes it manageable. You know there is an end date, and perhaps some of the new habits will stick.
And then I came across No Sloptober (https://no-sloptober.com/). This is the challenge: “This October we challenge you to abstain from LLM based tools entirely.”
The idea made me think. Because not using AI for a month is a rather different kind of challenge. AI has become genuinely useful for many of the things I do. Writing, coding, brainstorming, making plans, researching ideas, building small tools and getting projects started. Stop using AI for a month and I would certainly discover which things I can still do perfectly well without it.
And perhaps that is exactly the point. There is a legitimate concern here. If AI becomes very good at writing a piece of code, do we slowly lose some of our own coding skills? If it can turn a few notes into a nicely structured text, do our writing skills deteriorate? If we ask AI to make our plans, are we getting worse at planning? It is the old use-it-or-lose-it question, only this time applied to an increasingly large collection of skills.
At the same time, deliberately giving up a useful tool also feels slightly strange to me. I wouldn’t stop using a text editor for a month to improve my writing. I wouldn’t stop using a calculator to improve my arithmetic. AI can save enormous amounts of time and, used sensibly, can make it possible to try things that otherwise might remain ideas on a to-do list.
So: No Sloptober or not? I think that is a very personal choice. If you feel AI has taken over too much of your work, a month without it could be a fascinating experiment. You might discover which skills you have been outsourcing without really noticing.
I have already made my choice. I will continue using AI in October. But I have promised myself something else: I am going to be much more disciplined about finishing several of my own projects and starting a few new ones.
So in a way, I am joining the challenge. Just not quite according to the rules. Instead of making October a month without AI, I want to see how much I can actually build and finish in one month with AI. My October challenge is therefore pretty simple: make it an unusually productive month.