Deskilling

Deskilling is when a tool makes your results better while your own ability to do the thing without it quietly gets worse.

You have lived in Lisbon for a year. Your phone translates the pharmacy label, drafts your reply to the landlord, whispers the waiter's question into your ear. Your Portuguese conversations have never gone smoother. Then the battery dies at a neighbor's dinner table, someone asks you something warm and ordinary, and you sit there with a fork in your hand and nothing in your mouth. A year in, and you cannot say it yourself.

Deskilling is the gap that opens when assisted performance rises while your unaided ability, recall, and judgment fall. The tell is that you cannot remember the last time you tried without the tool, and the thought of trying makes you tense. It costs you the thing you actually wanted, which was not translated sentences but the capacity to speak, and it stays hidden because the output looks fine right up to the moment the support disappears. The smallest correction is a scheduled unaided attempt: once a week, order and pay in Portuguese with the phone in your pocket, notice exactly where you stall, and let those stalls set what you study next. It is a false alarm when the skill was never yours to keep. Nobody needs to do long division by hand, and a skill you deliberately traded away is a choice, not a leak.