You Cannot Outsource Understanding

I’m in the middle of a deployment right now. Someone handed me a project I did not build. Pressure is on, and the timeline is short. The fastest path: tell an AI agent to deploy it, walk away, and come back once it’s ready. That’s the pitch, anyway. In practice this could work or not. In both cases, I’ll still be accountable for the output.

So I’m not doing that. I’m spending the first hours asking it to explain the architecture, the dependencies, and why things are where they are. It feels slower. It probably is slower, today.

There’s an old saying I keep coming back to: if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.

The temptation to use these tools to produce the answer is always there. But we can also use them to explain, to push back on the answer, and to ask why, so the agent becomes a tutor. That increases our analytical thinking instead of removing it from the equation.

You cannot outsource understanding. The agent can produce an outcome, but the responsibility for what it does is still ours. So we need to be deliberate, not because the agent is dangerous, but because we are the ones who have to stand behind the result.