Are engineers becoming people "used" by AI: gihyo.jp discusses the state of unaware passivity

This series is delivered as an excerpt, partially excerpted and edited, from the book "Engineers' Practical AI Sparring Techniques" to be published in September 2026.

You use AI every day, yet you don't feel your own skills improving. Worse, in an era when AI does anything for you, you don't know how you should grow. Many engineers may feel this way. In this first article, I explain a way of thinking that helps you become aware of your relationship with AI and connect it to growth.

Ask AI and most things get taken care of. What you want to do can easily take shape, and work seems to proceed without delay. But if you stop for a moment and ask yourself, "What have I become able to do?" surprisingly few people may be able to answer right away. The reason is that they are not conscious of what they learn and how they should grow in their daily work. Digging deeper, the root cause may be that they have fallen into a state of being "used" by AI.

You leave implementation to AI, accept the output code as is, decide "as long as it works, it's OK," and move on to the next step. In this way of proceeding, which at first glance looks like improved efficiency, you cannot say "I am using AI for my work." You are being "used" by AI.

Of course, in reality there is a gradation, and almost no one is completely proactive or completely passive. Everyone moves back and forth between the two depending on the situation and context. What is tricky is that appearance and reality can diverge. Even when you look passive, you may be making a proactive decision to deliberately leave things to AI; and even when you think you are using AI proactively, your thinking may in fact be guided by AI's output.

Therefore, the axis of proactive versus passive alone does not reveal the essence of this relationship problem. To grasp the reality correctly, there is one more important axis. That is whether you are aware of it. Awareness here means being able to answer the following two questions.

What is truly dangerous is not being aware that you are being used.

By combining the two axes of "relationship" and "presence or absence of awareness," the relationship with AI can be organized into four quadrants.

A matrix with the presence or absence of awareness added

Aware / Unaware

*△ is a problem, but it is easy for both the person and those around them to notice. × is difficult to notice in itself.

Let us look at two of these four quadrants that are especially important.

Judging "this task is just writing simple code, so let's leave it all to AI" and having code generated corresponds to the "passive × aware" state. At first glance it looks like dependence on AI, but in fact it is not so precarious. Because you are aware that you are deliberately handing over the initiative for now, you can regain your agency at any time when a situation arises in which you should think for yourself, such as design involving the core of the system.

On the other hand, the state that requires the most caution and that many engineers tend to fall into is the "proactive × unaware" state. Here, I define this state as "unaware passive voice."

For example, suppose that when implementing a new feature, you ask AI, "What is the best way to achieve ○○?" You look at the proposal that comes back, think "I see, this is the optimal solution," and adopt it. However, in reality, you may merely have been convinced by how plausible it looks at a glance. If you have not examined other options, the validity of that approach, or its disadvantages yourself, then that is not a proactive judgment; it is simply accepting AI's output unconditionally.

Or suppose you submit materials or design documents created by AI to your boss or a client without checking the contents. When you are asked questions, you are at a loss for words and cannot explain in your own words. Even if you think you are proceeding with work proactively, in reality you are just throwing your thinking entirely to AI.

In other words, even if you believe you are proactive, your thinking is actually being guided by AI. This is the "unaware passive voice," and precisely because it is hard to notice, its impact is large; it is the most frightening state in the AI era.

The biggest reason this "unaware passive voice" is frightening is none other than that it robs you of opportunities to grow as an engineer.

Engineers' growth is often driven by a painstaking, unglamorous process. You read the official documentation, form hypotheses, rewrite the code, and fail over and over again. A senior colleague presses you with, "What are you actually trying to achieve in the first place?" and while feeling down, you reflect on yourself and become aware of how insufficient your own experience and thinking are. Only by spinning this cycle of "challenge → failure → introspection" can you come to understand the essential structure of a problem for the first time.

Seeking only answers from AI means skipping this process, which is indispensable for growth, entirely. In a process where you settle for "the code is correct, the behavior is correct, so it's OK," you become unable to notice even what you are failing to learn or what opportunities for growth are being taken from you.

The engineer's growth process

As a result, even if using AI speeds up writing code, you become unable to think through "what the problem is and why it was implemented that way" in your own head. With this, the ability to solve on your own problems for which AI does not give you the answer does not develop. When a failure occurs in a complex system generated by AI, or when you have to make a judgment yourself, you are left completely helpless.

That said, I am not trying to say that you cannot grow if you use AI. By leaving routine work to AI, you can spend the freed-up time on higher-level thinking, such as what should be solved and why it should be built. That is precisely why what matters is whether you are aware of what you lose and what you gain by using AI. Without that awareness, you cannot even notice what you are losing.

In exchange for the overwhelming convenience right in front of you, letting go of the thinking process and losing opportunities for growth without being aware of it—that is the same as walking the path toward becoming a person who can soon be replaced by AI.

So far I have discussed the danger of unconsciously depending on AI, but to avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that this book does not argue that you should not use AI. Quite the opposite: AI is something you should use to the fullest. It is just that using it properly requires a corresponding mindset, and if you use it correctly, AI will greatly boost your growth.