> I'd actually say that you end up needing to think more in the first example.

Yes, but you are thinking about the wrong things, so the effort get spent poorly.

It is usually much more efficient to build your own mental model than to try to search for a solution that solves exactly what you need from externally. Without that mental model it is hard to evaluate whether the external solution even does what you want, so its something you need to do either way.

Depends how complex the task is. Sometimes I’m handed tasks so simple but tedious that AI has meant I can breeze through these instead of burning myself out on them. Sure, it doesn’t speed things up much in terms of time, but I’m way less burnt out at the end because it’s doing all the fiddly stuff that would tire me out. I suspect the tasks I get aren’t that typical though.