Robin Roy's 5-minute talk at Camp Digital 2026 made a simple but important point about how AI tools change the way we think — and what to do about it. Worth reading if you're earlier in your career.

One of the lunchtime lightning talks at Camp Digital this year was from Robin Roy, an apprentice developer. Five minutes. Clear, practical, and honest about where he’s coming from.

He opened with a show of hands — how many people in the room have used AI recently. Every hand went up. His observation: we’ve gone from AI being science fiction to using it almost every day, and that shift happened fast enough that most of us haven’t thought much about how we use it.

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He ran through the well-documented benefits first. A 2025 Stack Overflow developer survey: 69% of developers report increased productivity. 63% say they learn faster when using AI, especially for picking up unfamiliar concepts. He acknowledged these from his own experience — AI as a centralised place to get information quickly is genuinely useful, particularly when you’re still learning.

Then the other side.

A 2025 study split participants into three groups: no support, search engine, or large language model. All writing essays. Afterwards, they were asked about their own work.

The LLM group showed a roughly 55% drop on active thinking measures compared to the unsupported group. 78% couldn’t actively recall quotes from their own essays.

The caveat he was careful to include: this isn’t evidence that AI makes you less intelligent. Different tools change how we mentally engage. Writing without support requires active processing. Editing an AI draft doesn’t require the same cognitive work. If you’re trying to retain something or build understanding, that gap matters.

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His practical principles were simple and useful.

Do: be critical of AI outputs — confident doesn’t mean correct. Use AI to support your thinking, not replace it. Use it to understand the reasoning behind things, not just to get the answer.

Don’t: trust blindly. Use AI without understanding what it’s doing. Become so dependent on it that you can’t work through a problem without it.

He closed with a quote framing AI as something like a drug — useful, dangerous, and hypnotic. The more you reach for it automatically, the more it becomes the default.

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The audience for this framing is probably less experienced developers who are still forming habits, more than people who’ve already built a working relationship with these tools. If AI assistance is the first way you learn to do something, you might never do the cognitive work that builds the mental model underneath. You get the output without the understanding.

The fix isn’t to avoid AI. It’s to stay deliberate about what you’re using it for — and to keep doing the thinking that builds the thing AI can’t give you.

Robin Roy spoke as part of the 300-second talks at Camp Digital 2026 in Manchester on 7 May 2026.