I know that bringing up Dunning-Kruger is such a "Reddit thing" but AI genuinely does make it way more relevant. We all now have superficial expertise in whatever we need and with that it's extremely easy to get an overinflated sense of your own intelligence, knowledge or ability.

I am not saying AI tooling cannot be mega helpful but it does not turn you into some kind of polymath / Leonardo da Vinci. We all have it, we can all go on these 'research quests'. I am not just talking about coding but whatever other disciplines you can now easily research - law, medicine, history, philosophy... Hell my foot is sore from running so I looked up stuff that might help - I am not a podiatrist!

It's so easy to get an unattributed surface-level understanding of things. I was in the Yucatan earlier this year and went on a whole thing learning about Cortez and the Spanish conquistadors. I was asking increasingly obscure questions (I wanted to understand the war dogs, supply lines, gunpowder efficacy etc) and it always had an answer but when I pressed for sources it did the AI equivalent of shrugging or vaguely pointed to the writings of Bernal Diaz. A conquistador who wrote about his experiences 50 years after the events as an old man.

I supplemented that with a bunch of podcasts and got a vivid picture of things but I am no expert, just someone who went on holiday and wanted to know part of the history of the region. Maybe 20-30h total 'research'. There are people who spend their whole lives understanding that period, becoming SMEs intimately familiar with basically every written account we have.

Point being, we shouldn't let ourselves go on ego trips or get an overinflated idea of our understanding of things we only became aware of 5 minutes ago. Prompting does not make us Gods, just people using the same tools available to everyone else.