A tool that makes you think

Watched a TED talk today that named something I'd built without having a name for it.

Advait Sarkar, a researcher at Microsoft, argues that when we hand our reasoning to AI, we quietly become middle managers for our own thoughts. His own research found people put less effort into thinking when the AI was there to do it. His fix isn't to quit the tools. It's to build tools that push back on you. He calls it productive resistance. A machine that raises the counterargument, flags the weak spot, makes you defend your own draft.

I sat there realizing I'd already done this. Twice.

The AI workflow I built for test cases had a second agent whose only job was to critique the first one's work before anything shipped. The job search tool I use flags a bullet when it thinks I'm stretching the truth and asks me before it goes out.

I didn't set out to build friction. I just didn't trust a single confident pass, from a person or a machine, and I'd learned to put a reviewer in the loop.

Turns out that instinct has a name now.

His closing question is the whole thing: do you want a tool that thinks for you, or a tool that makes you think?

I keep choosing the second one. Not because I'm disciplined. Because I've been burned by the first one enough times to build the guardrail in.