Addy Osmani on keeping critical thinking alive when AI agents do the work
addyosmani · x · 2026-11-03
Google engineering leader Addy Osmani published an essay on preserving critical thinking in the age of agentic workflows: with so much daily work routed through agents, the cognitive space between question and answer has shrunk to seconds, and nothing in the day-to-day forces deep scrutiny anymore.
He clarifies he's a big fan of these tools — running multiple parallel sessions himself and expecting models to keep improving — but wants engineers and product people who have fully bought in to avoid offloading their judgment entirely. An accompanying graphic frames the slide as "offloading → deferral → surrender," and a Pangram detector confirms the piece is 90% human-written.
More from AGI Musings
- What still makes humans unique in the age of AI, per philosopher Pia Lauritzen — AnnaCiaunica · 2026-11-03
- Yoav Goldberg: If you can write a Python program for a task, it's not worth RL-ing over — yoavgo · 2026-11-03
- Alignment debate: treat AI as allies—slow down and stop deceiving them — davidmanheim · 2026-11-03
- Gary Marcus doubles down: Anthropic's AGI projections were 'insane,' $10K bet still on — GaryMarcus · 2026-11-03
- 'AI is just matrix multiplication' is the new 'emotions are just chemicals' — karmicoder · 2026-11-03
- LLMs forecast economics RCT effects with 0.054 SD median error, beating naive benchmarks — RobbWiller · 2026-11-03