AI makes answers faster but I still need time to understand them :(

Lately I’ve noticed a strange feeling when I spend an hour thinking about a problem: guilt. Nobody is telling me I’m too slow. I’m the one thinking that I could probably have asked AI and finished this in 30 minutes. The problem is that getting an answer and understanding it still take different amounts of time. AI can produce an explanation quickly, but it can’t make me absorb it at the same speed. Some of my open chats have turned into another backlog of things I should read. I’m an engineer, and I feel less confident about working through certain problems on my own. I don’t have concrete evidence that my skills have degraded. I also can’t honestly blame every forgotten detail on AI. But I do notice how quickly I reach for help now. One small thing I want to try is building Snake without AI. Just because I want to spend some time working through the stuck parts myself. How do you decide which problems are worth thinking through before asking a model? I’m interested in habits that you actually keep, rather than rules that sound good for two days.