when you outsource thinking to AI, you get that magical speed up. the agent is making decisions for you, so things move at agent speed. it often makes decisions without telling you, and the final "here's the plan" output often requires you to understand the problem at great depth, which requires return to human speed, so you skim and just approve.

the trick is to be mindful, aware, and deliberate about what decisions are being outsourced. this requires slowing down, losing that absurd 10x vibe coding gain. in exchange, youre more "in-the-loop" and accumulate less cognitive debt.

find ways to let the agent make the boring decisions, like how to loop over some array, or how to adapt the output of one call into the input of another.

make the real decisions ahead of time. encode them into specs. define boundaries, apis, key data structures. identify systems and responsibilities. explicitly enumerate error handling. set hard constraints around security and PII.

tell the agent to halt on ambiguity.

a good engineer will get a 2x or 3x speedup without the downsides.