Gowri Shankar

Reflexive by Default: The Role of Human Beings in an AI-Driven World

Posted April 13, 2025 by Gowri Shankar  ‐  6 min read

Like every self-respecting tech bro armed with a half-charged MacBook and a ChatGPT tab on speed dial, I too believed I was thinking. You know... solving bugs, crafting flows, building features. Classic human stuff. Then one day, mid-debug spiral, I caught myself whispering: “ChatGPT, explain this bug like I’m five.” And boom... insight. Progress. Sanity. That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t “thinking” anymore. I was prompting. Reflexively. No long walks. No rubber duck. Just straight-up neural outsourcing. At first, it felt like cheating. Then it felt like genius. Now? It just feels normal. This post is about that shift. The one where thinking (like a human) became optional, and thinking (like an AI) became... default. Spoiler: it’s not about losing your edge. It’s about sharpening it... with silicon. Welcome to the era where brains and bots team up... and we stop pretending we’re doing it solo.

Note: You can also listen to the podcast experience of this blog in Spotify.

This post is the third in an ongoing series on how I’m integrating AI across my workflow—from code to product to decision-making. Read the previous posts here…

From Logic Gates to LLMs: A Journey in Abstractions

The other day, mid squat rack banter, Pavan casually dropped a line that stuck with me.

“We’re not coding anymore... we’re just stacking abstractions. From logic gates to LLMs, it’s layers upon layers. Like mathematics, some say the language of God... we’ve built systems so deep, most of us don’t even need to understand the foundational layers anymore. Just like we don’t need to know Latin to speak English, we won’t need to know code to build software. AI will be our new lingua franca... fluent, intuitive, invisible.”

– Pavan Kumar, while working out in the Gym. 10th Apr 2025

I laughed, but also felt a strange sense of déjà vu.

Because once upon a time… circa 2007—I was deep in the weeds writing actual asm blocks in production. Not for fun. Not for a hackathon. But for real, shipping firmware.

I was building device drivers for LaserJet printers. Yes, the kind that sprayed CMYK dots at warp speed… 100 to 120 pages per minute. I had code that talked to the hardware abstraction layer, firmware that mapped out how much ink to spray for each pixel, and a system that translated vector entanglements and raster images into low-level instructions for precise printing.

Hardware, software, firmware… all choreographed through lines of code I could practically recite in hex.

Reflexive

Fast forward to today?

I’m solving bugs by asking ChatGPT to explain them like I’m five.

It’s not laziness. It’s evolution.

From bits and bytes to prompts and reflexes, we’re living through a paradigm shift. Just like abstraction freed us from worrying about registers and memory addresses, AI is freeing us from the mechanics of syntax. Pavan further said,

You don’t have to remember how to invert a binary tree anymore... just ask the machine.

– Pavan Kumar, 10th Apr 2025

And much like Pavan said, the new edge isn’t in knowing how to write code, but how to talk to the thing that does.
Meet Pavan here https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavanmehta91/

I am not alone, Tobi’s memo at Shopify

So, here’s how I stopped thinking (like a human) and started thinking (like an AI)…

As it turns out, I’m not alone in this line of thinking. On Thursday, I stumbled across Gonçalo Peres pointing to Tobi Lütke’s internal memo at Shopify, and it felt like someone had taken our(Pavan & I) scattered thoughts, organized them, sprinkled in some billion-dollar clarity, and hit Caps Lock. Tobi wasn’t just echoing what I’d been doing… he was articulating it with the precision of someone who’s already built empires on these instincts.

Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.
That line hit hard.

Because that’s exactly the shift I’ve been feeling too.

Meet Gonçalo here https://www.linkedin.com/in/goncaloperes/

We’re All Already Doing This

& We Don’t Say It Out Loud

It’s not that anyone mandated it. No team meeting, no policy change, no company-wide email that said “use AI or else.”

But one day, we just… stopped trying to solve things solo.

You want to debug something?
Don’t open Stack Overflow. Prompt.

You want to sketch a UX flow?
Don’t start a Figma file. Prompt.

You want to brainstorm ideas, rewrite copy, generate test cases, or build a prototype?
Prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt.


It’s not a trick. It’s not cheating. It’s just efficient. And like Tobi said, AI acts as a multiplier The better you are, the better your AI gets. The more you know, the more it gives. And the faster you prompt, the faster you learn.

Why Some AI Output Feels… Meh

The Amplifier Effect

Let’s say you’re a 7/10 in ReactJS. You ask AI to build a component, and it outputs something surprisingly elegant… maybe even cleaner than what you would’ve written.

Now let’s say you’re a 3/10 in testing. You ask AI to write tests. The result? Trash-tier. Barely useful.

What gives?

It’s not that the AI is dumb. It’s that you didn’t load it with enough context. Your lack of mental model is showing. And since AI is an amplifier, it amplified your gaps.

This isn’t a limitation of the tech… it’s a reflection of where you are in that domain.

Keyword Kung-Fu Is Real

But here’s the good news: you don’t have to be a 10/10 to get 10/10 output. Sometimes, all it takes is the right vocabulary.

Even if you’re just a 4 in UX, if you prompt with things like:

“Improve this form using better hierarchy and accessibility. Think Dieter Rams meets Apple.”


Suddenly, your 4 becomes a 7. Why? Because AI understands design language. Give it the right terms, and it delivers.

Just like Shopify encourages folks to share prompts in Slack, I’ve started keeping a personal “prompt stack.” It’s honestly better than bookmarks.

Reflexive

The Testing Trap (And Why It’s Not AI’s Fault)

Tests Aren’t Just Code

One area where this gets tricky: testing.

Writing good tests requires empathy.
You have to imagine how a system might fail.
What a user might do wrong.
Where data might go sideways.

If you’ve never thought that way, AI won’t either.

That’s why prompting AI to write tests can feel so hit-or-miss… because the hard part isn’t writing the test, it’s thinking of what to test.

You have no clue how much I miss Rajat Jain.

Meet Rajat here https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajat-jain-4994a172/

You Learn By Prompting Anyway

So what do you do?

You prompt anyway. You read. You edit.
You add edge cases. You add weird inputs.
You learn… reflexively.

Tobi’s Memo: A Wake-Up Call

Or Validation, Depending on Where You’re At

Tobi’s memo isn’t just a Shopify thing… it’s a tech-wide nudge.

“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation.”
“Before asking for headcount, show what AI can do.”
“Learning to use AI well is a skill, and it must be learned by *using it a lot*.”

Honestly? It’s refreshing.
It cuts through the noise.
It turns AI from “this cool experiment” into “the way we work now.”

This post… this reflection… was inspired by that memo. Because I realized that somewhere along the way, I had already made that shift.

Reflexively.

Final Thought

We’re not preparing for the future. We’re living in it.

The ones who thrive won’t be the ones with the deepest skills.
They’ll be the ones who amplify their skills… with AI.
The ones who stop thinking (in isolation) and start thinking with machines.

So yeah, don’t wait for lightning bolts of genius anymore.

Just prompt.