I love automating things with AI. When a task lands on my desk, my first thought is usually: “How can I get AI to do this?”
So today, I want to talk about why I deliberately chose not to use AI for a particular task.
The task was preparing for a webinar next month. I needed to introduce a new product — Acquia Source — to Japanese customers, based on a webinar originally presented by our North American headquarters. Naturally, the materials needed to be in Japanese, so I spent the day translating slides.
Now, as I mentioned, I’m passionate about AI-powered efficiency. I’ll happily spend two hours automating something that takes ten minutes — because if I do that task twelve more times, the investment pays off.
I could think of several ways to automate this translation. Have Gemini write a Google Apps Script to translate the Google Slides. Download the deck as PowerPoint and let Claude Code handle it. Any of these approaches would have gotten the job done with minimal effort on my part.
But then I watched the recorded webinar and read through the original slides, and something clicked. The new features and the presentation itself were genuinely impressive. I didn’t just want to present this material — I wanted to understand it. I wanted to be able to speak about this product’s value in my own words when I’m in front of customers and partners.
Translating slides from English to Japanese is something AI can do in seconds. But I closed the Gemini tab in my browser, sat down with the slides, and started typing each sentence into Japanese myself — absorbing the meaning, choosing words as if I were speaking directly to a customer sitting across from me.
In Japan, there’s a tradition called shakyo — the practice of hand-copying Buddhist sutras. It began in ancient times when manuscripts needed to be physically duplicated, but people still practice it today as a form of meditation and spiritual discipline. My late grandfather loved copying sutras onto large folding screens, and I remember them displayed at his funeral.
In an age when you can buy any scripture at a bookstore — or download it instantly online — why would anyone copy it by hand? Because the act of reading, understanding, and transcribing deepens your connection to the teachings in a way that simply reading cannot.
If you’re an engineer, you probably relate to this. Think about the times you’ve typed out code from a textbook instead of copy-pasting it, or manually rewritten sample code you could have just cloned. In Japan, we call this kind of hands-on learning shakyo too.
The point is this: when you read something with your own eyes, process it through your own mind, and reproduce it with your own hands, you build a fundamentally deeper understanding.
AI can answer most of our questions. AI agents can autonomously handle an ever-growing range of tasks. But even in this era, the act of absorbing knowledge into your own brain — of feeling something resonate in your own heart — is something AI still can’t do for you. (Unless you go the brain-chip route, I suppose…)
I don’t think we need to memorize everything in the world. But I want to remember that we always have a choice: for the things that truly matter to us, we can choose to make them ours — stored in our own minds and hearts.
Epilogue
I’ll be honest. I caved. Translating every sentence by hand was taking too long, and I gave up after a few slides. I’m not proud of it.
What I did instead was copy the text from each slide into Gemini, one page at a time, and replace the original content with the translated output.
Calling this shakyo would probably get me in trouble with the monks — but I did use my own hands, and my understanding of the presentation is genuinely deeper for it. (Even if it was just copy-paste…)
The thing is, I could have translated every slide without reading a single line. But I chose not to. I chose to engage with the content, page by page, and I found real value in that deliberate choice.
Balancing AI efficiency with genuine learning — and being conscious that we always have that choice — matters more than ever.