An Anthropic engineer warns about 'cognitive surrender' as AI agents take over his work
Source: Business Insider ·
"When you can't explain the answer to a question, even by way of your agent, you've ceded ownership," Claude Code engineer Addy Osmani wrote.
From the source
Bloomberg/Getty ImagesAnthropic engineer Addy Osmani warned about "cognitive surrender" among coders."Nothing in my day-to-day forces critical thinking on me," he wrote, citing AI agents as the culprit.Osmani advocated for picking selectively where to offload — and where to ask follow-up questions.Addy Osmani is thinking hard about thinking.Osmani works on the Claude Code team at Anthropic. The company is all in on agentic coding — he helps create its AI coding product, after all — and has reduced human code writing."Increasingly, nothing in my day-to-day forces critical thinking on me now that so much of my work runs through agents," Osmani wrote in a Tuesday X essay.Engineers have expressed similar concerns in the last year: AI has turned them more into operators than builders. One OpenAI alum told Business Insider that AI coding was tedious and boring.Osmani didn't want engineers to stop using AI; he wanted them to learn to think more deeply.The risk of "cognitive surrender"Osmani…
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