[jonmagic]

I really liked this piece, and I share the concern, but I think “outsourcing thinking” is slightly the wrong frame.

In my own work, I found the real failure mode wasn’t using AI, it was automating the wrong parts. When I let AI generate summaries or reflections for me, I lost the value of the task. Not because thinking disappeared, but because the meaning-making did.

The distinction that’s helped me is: - If a task’s value comes from doing the thinking (reflection, synthesis, judgment), design AI as a collaborator, asking questions, prompting, pushing back. - If the task is execution or recall, automate it aggressively.

So the problem isn’t that we outsource thinking, it’s that we sometimes bypass the cognitive loops that actually matter. The design choice is whether AI replaces those loops or helps surface them.

I wrote more about that here if useful: https://jonmagic.com/posts/designing-collaborations-not-just...