In July of 2018 I sat down at a keyboard and wrote a post about communication.

I had just come through chemo and surgery to clean out my lymph nodes — my second time with cancer, the first having been in 2004. I was on short-term disability. I was waiting to go back to my desk. I was eager to be around people again.

That’s the context for what I wrote. Most readers won’t know it. I didn’t put it in the post at the time. But it shapes everything I want to say tonight.

Eight years ago, I wrote:

I love words. I love looking at the definitions of words to see how they work… This morning as I started to sketch out the purpose of this post, I started to examine the word communicate.

Share or exchange information, news, or ideas. To succeed in conveying one’s ideas or in evoking understanding in others.

When I first started reading the definition I felt it was incomplete. If communicating only involved the sharing of ideas, we would all be excellent communicators. Just shout what you want people to hear as loud as you can and viola! Job complete… it isn’t that easy is it? In a word, no.

The second part of the definition I outlined brought the meaning into focus. To succeed in conveying one’s ideas and evoking understanding in others. This, in my opinion, is the heart of communication… understanding.

And the post closed with a line that surprised me a little when I read it back this morning:

You have important things to say. You have a viewpoint that you need to share.

That was 2018-me, fresh out of the hospital, writing to whoever would read his blog.

What I Notice Reading It Back

I expected to disagree with parts of it. Eight years is a long time. I’ve read more, written more, lived more. Yesterday I published a post laying out a framework I didn’t have in 2018 — three modes of conversation, communication and negotiation and capitulation, with intent as the variable that moves a conversation between them.

So I went back to read 2018-me expecting to find a writer who didn’t yet see what I see now.

I didn’t find that.

I found a writer whose framework was less developed, but whose convictions were the same as mine. People have important things to say. Bridging our differences so we can hear them is the goal. Understanding doesn’t require agreement. I still believe every line of it. Eight years and a lot of reading and a lot of conversations later, I haven’t moved on the spirit. I’ve gotten more precise about the approach.

That distinction matters more than I expected.

The Constancy Question

Most writing about personal growth assumes the writer changed and now sees what they used to miss. I used to think X, now I think Y, here’s what I learned. That’s the standard arc.

When I read 2018-me, that arc didn’t fit. The 2018 post is generous, optimistic, and trusting — and I’d assumed, before re-reading it, that I’d find a man who hadn’t yet been disappointed enough to know better. That’s the story most people tell about themselves at midlife. I used to be naïve. Now I’m wise.

But 2018-me wasn’t naïve. He’d already had cancer twice. He’d already watched manipulation happen in plenty of conversations. He’d already seen what people with agendas do to people without them. He chose to write generously about communication anyway, because that’s what he believed about people — and because he wanted to come back to his desk and his colleagues and his work and do the thing he’d been doing for years.

The generosity wasn’t innocence. It was a posture. A choice. Made by someone who had reasons to make a different choice and didn’t.

I still hold that posture. I’ve added language to it. I’ve built frameworks around it. I’ve gotten sharper at recognizing when someone in front of me isn’t operating from the same posture and adjusting accordingly. But the underlying conviction — that people have important things to say, and that the work is to bridge our differences so we can hear them — hasn’t moved.

Approach vs. Spirit

There’s a difference between disagreeing with the spirit of something you used to believe and disagreeing with the approach.

When the spirit changes, you’ve moved. You’re a different person operating from a different center, and your old work is evidence of who you used to be.

When the approach changes, you’ve stayed the same person and gotten better at doing what you’ve always been doing. The old work is evidence of the journey, not evidence of who you used to be.

Looking at 2018-me, the approach has gotten more sophisticated. I now know that some conversations aren’t really conversations. I know that techniques used for understanding can be used for manipulation, and that the techniques themselves give you no way to tell. I know that drift is real — that two people can start with shared goals and end up running tactics on each other without either of them quite noticing.

That’s the approach edit. The spirit didn’t move.

When you go back to old work and find that the spirit still holds, you’ve discovered something useful about yourself. You’ve found out what’s load-bearing in your worldview — the thing that survived eight years of evidence and didn’t bend.

When you go back and find the spirit has shifted, you’ve also learned something — what you used to believe and don’t anymore, why the change happened, what the new center is.

Both are good. Both teach you something about who you are. The mistake is assuming you’ll find the second one when you might find the first.

For me, this morning, the answer was: the spirit held. Eight years later, I still believe people have important things to say. I still believe bridging our differences so we can hear each other is the work. I just have better tools now for doing the work.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually a lot.

I just finished Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators. The book teaches a set of techniques for understanding people — listening so they feel heard, matching their conversational mode, building enough trust that real exchange becomes possible. The techniques are real and they work.

What’s missing from the book — and from most communication writing — is a clear picture of what happens when the same techniques get used for different purposes. Because they do, all the time, and the techniques themselves give you no way to tell the difference.

That’s the thing I want to talk about.

Three Modes

There’s a continuum running through almost every important conversation we have:

Communication is when both parties are trying to understand each other. The goal is shared ground. Even when interests differ, the orientation is mutual.

Negotiation is when there’s an outcome being sought, and both parties know it. A salesperson and a customer. Two business partners. A couple deciding where to vacation. The outcome matters, the interests may diverge, but the rules of the game are visible to everyone in the room.

Capitulation is when one party knows the stakes more clearly than the other and uses the asymmetry to move them somewhere they wouldn’t have chosen with full information. The other party doesn’t realize they’re being moved. By the time they figure it out, the conversation is over and they’ve already agreed to something.

The techniques that produce each of these are largely the same. Listening. Reflecting back. Naming emotions. Looking for common values. The variable isn’t the technique. The variable is what you’re trying to do with it.

Intent Is the Variable

Reading someone well is a neutral skill. It can be used to honor them or to operate on them. Two people can run identical techniques and produce opposite ethical outcomes depending on what they’re actually trying to accomplish.

I don’t have a problem with salespeople. If someone has a product they genuinely believe will make my life better, I want them to sell to me. The techniques they use to understand my situation, find what I actually need, and propose a solution are exactly the same techniques a friend might use to recommend a restaurant. The difference isn’t the moves. It’s whether the person across from me is here to enrich my experience or here to take from it.

The hard part is that intent is invisible. You can’t reach across a table and verify what someone is actually trying to do. So how does anyone know?

The most reliable answer is pattern over time. People who’ve been around me long enough have watched me handle situations where I had something to gain and chose not to take it. They’ve seen me update my position when I realized I was wrong. They know what I’ve stood by when it cost me. That track record speaks louder than any single conversation. Intent reveals itself through pattern, and over a long enough timeframe, it can’t really hide.

The Honest Middle

Most real conversations don’t have pure intent. They have mixed intent. You want to help someone and you want them to do what you think is right and you’d prefer the outcome that benefits you. All at once. That’s not a flaw. That’s how human cognition actually works.

Marriage is where I see this most clearly in my own life. After twenty-seven years, I know my intentions toward my wife are fundamentally good. But on a given Tuesday, when I’m pushing for us to go out to dinner, am I doing it because she’s tired and needs a break, or because I’m lazy and don’t feel like cooking? Most of the time it’s both. The discipline isn’t to pretend the selfish part isn’t there. The discipline is to recognize both parts are present and ask which one is driving the conversation.

The same thing happens at work. The same thing happens in friendships. Pure intent is rare. Mixed intent is the human condition. The question isn’t whether you’re free of self-interest. The question is whether you can see it when it’s there and not let it run the show.

Knowing You’re Wrong

There’s a moment in some conversations where I realize, mid-sentence, that I’ve been arguing for the wrong thing. I think out loud, which means sometimes the act of articulating a position is what reveals to me that I no longer hold it. The honest move is to stop and say so. Wait. Hold on. I just realized I’m not thinking about this right. Forgive me — let me back up.

The reader will ask: how do you know whether someone is genuinely updating or just capitulating to pressure? From outside, both look like changing your mind.

There’s a tell. The genuine update has energy. It looks like discovery — oh, I just saw something I hadn’t seen. It’s an aha moment. The capitulation has the opposite shape. It looks like resignation. The person isn’t surprised by what they’re now saying. They’re tired of defending what they were saying before.

It’s not an aha moment. It’s an oh-crap moment.

The two are visibly different if you’re paying attention. Genuine updates make a person more present in the conversation. Capitulation withdraws them.

The Test

Communication is for connection. Negotiation is for honest exchange. Capitulation is what happens when one of us has decided where the conversation ends before it began, and we don’t tell the other person.

The first two are good. The third one corrupts everything it touches — relationships, businesses, marriages, the public square. Most of what passes for “influence” or “persuasion technique” online right now is teaching people to operate on each other while calling it communication.

The techniques aren’t the problem. The intent behind them is.

The test I run on myself is one question: Am I here to enrich the experience of the person across from me, or am I here to take?

If I can’t answer that honestly, I shouldn’t be in the conversation yet.

Yesterday a 22-year-old developer named Austin Kennedy posted something on X that has been viewed over a million times.

“I’m 22 years old and Claude Code is deteriorating my brain. Every single day for the last 6 months I’ve had 6 to 8 Claude Code terminals open, waiting for a response just so I can hit ‘enter’ 75% of the time. And it’s doing something to me… None of us feel as sharp as we used to.”

The replies are predictable. Some people are smug. Some are sympathetic. The standard framing showed up almost immediately: the tools are amazing, but how you use them entails a trade-off with how you use your brain. Never forget there’s a trade-off there.

The trade-off framing isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete.

The framing assumes that AI use necessarily costs cognitive function and the only question is how much. That’s not the whole picture. Two people can have eight terminals open and have completely different cognitive outcomes. The question isn’t how much you use AI. The question is what role you’re letting it play.

There are two modes, and they produce opposite results.

Abdication

Abdication mode is the mode Austin is describing. AI does the thinking. You do the executing. You ask, it answers, you accept, you ship. Hit enter. Hit enter. Hit enter.

Brain softens because you’ve outsourced the part of cognition that builds neural pathways — the wrestling, the articulating, the testing-against-reality. Six to eight terminals running in abdication mode for six months will absolutely deteriorate your sharpness. Austin isn’t wrong about what’s happening to him. He’s just misdiagnosing what caused it.

I’ve been there. Earlier this year I was running editorial passes on one of my novels. I’d run a chapter through Claude, hit enter, glance at the output, hit enter on the next chapter. I told myself I was doing light edits. After two or three chapters I went back and read what had actually shipped, and the AI hadn’t just edited my prose — it had quietly changed what my protagonist was doing. Connection points I’d built in earlier chapters were gone. The story was drifting and I hadn’t noticed because I hadn’t been reading. I’d been hitting enter.

That was my wake-up call. Everything I generate, I have to review. Not just the words. The reasoning. The intention I gave it versus what came back. The places where it made decisions I didn’t authorize.

Abdication doesn’t announce itself. You slide into it.

Augmentation

Augmentation mode is the opposite shape. You are the thinker. AI is the amplifier. You bring a thought. AI sharpens it. You push back. You refine your own articulation against a partner that won’t let vague thinking pass.

The brain doesn’t soften here — it strengthens. You’re now articulating more precisely, more often, against a more demanding interlocutor than most humans you encounter daily. The reps build the muscle, not atrophy it.

The catch is that augmentation requires something to amplify. You can’t sharpen what isn’t there. Cal Newport has written extensively about the cognitive infrastructure people built before AI existed — the deep reading, the long-form thinking, the deliberate practice that produced minds capable of holding complex problems at length. Augmentation works because that infrastructure is there to amplify.

Most people running AI tools today are skipping the step where the infrastructure gets built. They’re trying to amplify thinking they never trained. The tool can’t strengthen what isn’t there.

C.S. Lewis wrote something in the preface to The Great Divorce that I keep coming back to:

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

You don’t undo a wrong math problem by working the problem harder. You go back to the step where the error entered and start again from there.

The same is true here. You don’t recover from six months of abdication by doing more AI work better. You go back to the step where you stopped engaging — wherever that is for you — and you rebuild the engagement. Then the AI can resume amplifying instead of replacing.

What I’d Say to Austin

He’s not in the trouble he thinks he’s in.

He felt something was wrong. He named it. He went on record in front of more than a million people and said his brain was getting softer and he thought the tool was doing it. That admission is the entire game. Most people sliding into abdication don’t notice. Or they notice and they make excuses. He didn’t.

I don’t know the specifics of his work. Six to eight parallel terminals could be a workflow where most prompts are routine approvals and a smaller share require real engagement — that’s a different scenario than rote abdication. Only he knows which it is.

But that 75% number is worth sitting with. Hitting enter most of the time without engaging is where abdication lives, regardless of how anyone arrived there. If most of what’s coming back from the tool isn’t getting read for reasoning — only for output — the cognitive workout has stopped happening. That’s the muscle that softens.

If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t tell myself to use AI less. I would make sure my understanding was rock solid and that the enter button never got hit unless I knew exactly what was being executed.

That’s the whole discipline, compressed. Know what you’re trying to build before you start. Know what each prompt is asking the tool to do. Read the reasoning before you accept the output. Don’t approve what you didn’t understand.

If he can hold that line, the eight terminals aren’t the problem. They’re a workflow. If he can’t hold that line, the terminals aren’t the problem either — the engagement is, and that’s the thing to rebuild.

Either way, the diagnostic isn’t am I using AI too much. It’s am I still doing the thinking.

The tool isn’t the problem. The relationship to the tool is the problem.

He realized something was off in six months. He’s going to be fine.

He just has to walk back to where he went wrong, and start again from there.