Education · 2026-11-05

How to Keep Your Skills When Working with AI: Anthropic Engineer's Warning

Anthropic engineer Addy Osmani advises using AI without handing over all your thinking, because skills fade quickly without practice.

✨ Why be careful

Addy Osmani, an Anthropic engineer who works on the Claude Code tool, warns developers about relying too much on artificial intelligence. According to him, AI can quietly reduce our mental activity. He calls the most dangerous form of this "cognitive surrender", when a person fully trusts AI answers and doesn't even try to understand them.

Osmani says that in his daily work there are fewer and fewer tasks that make him think for himself, because AI agents now handle most of them. He does not advise giving up the technology. His goal is to use AI and keep critical thinking.

📌 Three levels of handing work to AI

Osmani describes three types of interaction with AI. The first is cognitive offloading. You delegate a task to AI but keep control and responsibility for the result. He considers this normal practice.

The second is cognitive shifting. Here the answer AI generates becomes your starting point for further work, and you no longer check its foundation.

The third is cognitive surrender. This means fully trusting AI answers without trying to understand them. The term was introduced by researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Osmani calls it a sign of laziness that builds up so-called "cognitive debt". He believes handing over a task entirely to AI is acceptable only where the cost of a mistake is low.

🔹 Simple habits that help keep your skills

Osmani suggests making verification a habit and regularly asking yourself control questions. For example: "Did I form a hypothesis before asking AI?" and "Which specific skills am I stopping practicing?" If you cannot explain an answer, even with the help of your agent, he says, you have lost ownership of that result.

He compares this to everyday skills. Few people can navigate by a paper map or remember friends' phone numbers by heart since smartphones appeared. His advice is simple: keep doing by hand the things you are not ready to give up. Skills you stop training fade faster than you think.

Sources: 🔗 DOU/dev.ua