Do It By Hand First: A Method for Keeping Critical Thinking Alive in the Age of AI

There's a habit I've used for twenty years to learn hard things at work: solve it by hand, write down how, script the parts that repeat, and only automate once I truly understand it. It turns out that same order, do the work first and hand it off last, lines up with a lot of what we know about how durable understanding forms, and with the kind of thinking AI makes it dangerously easy to skip.…