AI and the Zone of Proximal Development

Reflecting a bit on where I’m getting good use out of AI tools and where not, I found that it helps to think about the different zones of competency. Tasks that I’m fully capable of doing myself are easy to delegate to an AI, since I’ll know precisely when, where, and how it went astray in case that it makes mistakes. Tasks that are way outside my zone of comfort, on the other hand, are not something I can easily delegate, because I would have no way of knowing whether it made a mistake.

So far, so good. But there’s a special sweet spot where we can get a lot out of using AI, and that’s in those situations where the task the AI is helping us with is just a little bit outside our usual zone of comfort, which in the literature is called the Zone of Proximal Development. That zone is the difference between what you can do by yourself and what you can do with assistance.

I see this especially when programming. If you know any programming language deeply, you can get help from the AI writing in an unfamiliar language. Your general good sense will allow you spot issues, and you can trust your experience and intuition when reviewing these results. I’m sure this will apply to other skills, too. The benefit of using AI assistance in this context is that, through mere exposure, you’ll pick up new skills and expand your zone of competency.

Using AI to push against your current boundaries means you’ll use it to elevate yourself instead of relying on it as a crutch and letting your brain atrophy.