Using Agents Without Becoming Dumb

AI is making our students us dumb. Specifically, students who use LLMs show improved performance compared to students who don’t—as long as they have access to the LLMs. But they perform worse when LLM access is taken away.

This is not a surprise. All of these are true:

1. LLMs can help you get things done without you ever bothering to even find out what exactly the LLM did to complete the task.

2. This is called cognitive offloading: your brain stops thinking because the LLM is doing all the thinking. So, your brain never gets the practice+understanding that is necessary.

3. Smart+non-lazy people use LLMs to do things, and then spend time understanding what exactly the LLM did. This is the right thing to do for two reasons: a) this reduces cognitive offloading, and b) this is necessary to catch and correct any LLM hallucinations

4. Most students are lazy, so they don’t do #3, they do #2.

5. Most other people, non-students, also fall under category #4

In short, LLMs are a great tool to help you learn, but LLMs are also a great tool to help you avoid learning. You should be in the first category, but many people using LLMs are in the second. I taught a course this month (“Data Analytics and Data Science with the help of Codex CLI”), and it was a continuous struggle to keep students in the first category instead of the second.

So if you are using agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI) and don’t want your brain to atrophy, here is a great prompt you can use to ensure that you learn while the agent does work for you:

If you end up using this prompt or something similar, let me know your experience with it. Everything is changing too fast; nobody knows anything, we are all stumbling in the dark, trying various things, and the only way to get better is to share our experiences with each other.