Addy Osmani 谈 Agent 时代如何保持批判性思维

https://x.com/i/article/2116367635365695488

【X 长文】Critical thinking when agents do the work

Back in the day, critical thinking was taught as approaching new info with humble curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism - take in different views, form your own opinion. Still true, but increasingly, nothing in my day-to-day forces critical thinking on me now that so much of my work runs through agents. For the engineers and product people who have fully bought into agentic workflows (running multiple sessions in parallel and expecting the models to improve), I'm here to say: I'm a big fan of these tools. I'm not writing this to advocate for less agentic workflows.

My goal is to help you maintain critical thinking in a world where it's easy to offload anything to an agent.

In the past, most of our cognitive and aesthetic processing happened in the space between question and answer. That space is now measured in seconds. The more you use agentic workflows, the more difficult it becomes (though not in the way I think people expected): as the models improve, the percentage of obvious errors is lower. Many (most?) outputs will be well-written and mostly correct, but they won't demand a second look.

Even if you are running many agents at a time, you still only have one pair of eyes on the outputs.

You have to build critical thinking into your day, because by default nothing will do it for you.

Part of the reason it's hard to self-correct for this is that agentic workflows are pleasant. Getting fast, pleasant, often-correct answers is refreshing in a busy day, but that's also why it's easy to relax your vigilance.