I turned off autocorrect for a month. Here's what I learned about how I actually type

Autocorrect is supposed to be invisible. Turn it off and you notice, immediately, how much of your daily typing was never actually yours.

Week one was humbling. My real typos are not the cute kind autocorrect quietly fixes — they are the same three words, wrong, every single time, because I learned them wrong years ago and a piece of software has been covering for me ever since.

Week two I started noticing something else: how often I second-guess a correct word because autocorrect had, at some point, "fixed" it into something wrong, and I had trusted the fix. Names, technical terms, a coworker spelled with one L instead of two. The software was not neutral. It was a second author I had never agreed to hire.

By week four, typing felt slower but more mine. I turned autocorrect back on for texting, where speed matters more than ownership. I have left it off for anything I actually publish. The extra eight seconds per paragraph is a fair price for knowing the words are actually the ones I meant.

Related reading: The Practical Guide to Using AI Tools Without Getting Burned and Renting Robots: Is It the Smart Move for Fast-Changing Tech?.