In these days of AI usage, the temptation of giving all the work to agents, including the thinking, can be risky for a few reasons:
- We will slowly forget how to do it. 🙂 Yeah, we will get dumber. We are anti-fragile after all, and we need to struggle to keep getting better.
- AI agents will keep adding more and more to everything they do, increasing the complexity of solutions to a level where it becomes easier to rewrite than to try to fix it. Sometimes I ask myself if someone is trying to sell this model, but that should be my conspiracy theory persona talking, don’t listen to that guy.
(A random guy raises his hand at the back of my head) Yeah, but AI is pretty good at doing stuff, eh? And really fast…
Sure. That reminds me of when I started to work in technology, automating processes, and the gist of the conversations was, if you automate a wrong process, you will have faster bad results. This fact did not change. Throw prompts at AI agents and you will have a big ball of unreadable code full of hidden problems. Do some thinking, do some planning, and maybe we have a chance to build things we never imagined were possible. Maybe.
We have an opportunity
There are people who will prefer to think alone, to elaborate ideas in their heads, have conversations with AI agents about it, and iterate until it feels comfortable. I want to invite you to a different exercise, the exercise of thinking together, the exercise of bringing ideas to paper, either in writing, or drawing, or talking, in whatever media you are good at. If none of those work for you, ask for AI’s help. But please do not bring a 20-page document to a thinking-together session, nobody will have the patience to read it. Make it short and direct.
The opportunity is to use AI to build stuff and keep us thinking, and mainly exercising the art of breaking down problems, think as a group about the small parts, make some agreements, then go back to your agents to build something, then come back again and keep repeating this.
Maybe this way we have a chance to become close tribes again, and maybe AI, after all, is not here to destroy us but to push us to be closer.
Maybe.
