When did you last solve a problem with plain old googling? Serious question about what we've offloaded

Not a doom post, an honest audit. I realized recently that I almost never open a search engine to figure something out anymore. I ask a model, and if the first answer is off I nudge it, and I get there. Fast. Convenient. And I noticed my instinct to dig, cross-check three sources, and form my own read has gotten weaker.

Two things can both be true here.

One, search genuinely got worse. For a while now the top results have been SEO sludge and ads, and letting a model retrieve and summarize with sources is often a better experience than wading through that yourself. So some of this is a rational switch, not laziness.

Two, there is a real cost that is easy to miss. When a model fills the gap instantly, you skip the part where you struggle, and the struggle was where the understanding used to form. If you notice a model is patching knowledge you should actually own, that is worth a pause.

The people I trust most on this use it as leverage for thinking, not a substitute. They still know why the answer is right. The failure mode is using it to avoid ever knowing.

So, genuine question, not a lecture: when did you last solve something the old way, and do you think your own ability to work through a hard problem unaided has changed in the last two years?