Two Years of AI in Daily Life
Two years of ordinary AI use outside the code editor, and the habits that quietly shifted.
Two years is long enough to form habits. Long enough for daily routines to shift.
Search feels different now
Google is not dead. But search feels fundamentally different. Gemini’s summary at the top of results is often enough on its own. When it is not, and multiple clicks are needed, frustration arrives faster than it used to. The bar for going deeper has risen.
That is not a complaint about Google specifically. The comparison point moved.
The people who just use it
The clearest sign that something shifted was not anything in my own behaviour. It was watching non-tech family members reach for ChatGPT for ordinary questions. They use it as the thing they ask, the way someone might open a browser. The idea that they are using AI does not seem to occur to them, and that is probably the point.
Recipes, specifically
Recipe websites are a mess of backstories, ads, popups, and results that are almost right. Asking AI for a recipe skips all of that and tailors the answer to what you actually want and feel like. I would not go back.
(The food is still yours.)
A tension I have not resolved
I sometimes still choose Google because it feels environmentally better. But when a result requires multiple clicks, that friction pulls me back to AI. The principled preference and the convenient one are not always the same thing. I do not have a clean answer to that.
Two years is long enough to build habits but not necessarily long enough to audit them. Where AI has not entered, what has been lost if anything, and what turned out to be surprising rather than predicted: I am not sure I could give honest answers yet.
What I can say is that the changes are real and mostly quiet. That might be what adoption looks like from the inside.