Really great read. It would be nice to follow up with an article "How AI can be used for supporting decision making" maybe? For example I am using AI to deep dive into the peovlems and create brainstorming or educational specifications that help me with answering to the questions from this article. I could and I must think outside of that, because again it is just AI, but it is almost like a rubber duck for me - it gives me additional time to think if my approach is good enough or should I look for some other solution. Agents can read my tech stack, what is the project about and provide me ideas or educational documents that are more personalized because of that
Love this, Janusz. You are describing exactly the way I think AI is most useful right now: as a thinking amplifier, not a decision maker. Using it as a rubber duck, to unpack a problem, draft specs, or surface options you might not have considered yet is a great pattern. The key, as you said, is that you still step back and make the call yourself.
I have written a bit about using AI for day to day engineering and decision support, but you are right that a focused piece on "how to use AI to support decisions without outsourcing your judgment" would be a good follow up to this one.
AI makes it easy to look productive, so people stop doing the simple checks that actually matter.
Thanks 😊 for taking time for sharing knowledge, it is really insightful.
Really great read. It would be nice to follow up with an article "How AI can be used for supporting decision making" maybe? For example I am using AI to deep dive into the peovlems and create brainstorming or educational specifications that help me with answering to the questions from this article. I could and I must think outside of that, because again it is just AI, but it is almost like a rubber duck for me - it gives me additional time to think if my approach is good enough or should I look for some other solution. Agents can read my tech stack, what is the project about and provide me ideas or educational documents that are more personalized because of that
Love this, Janusz. You are describing exactly the way I think AI is most useful right now: as a thinking amplifier, not a decision maker. Using it as a rubber duck, to unpack a problem, draft specs, or surface options you might not have considered yet is a great pattern. The key, as you said, is that you still step back and make the call yourself.
I have written a bit about using AI for day to day engineering and decision support, but you are right that a focused piece on "how to use AI to support decisions without outsourcing your judgment" would be a good follow up to this one.
Thank you for reading and for the nudge.
Great piece, Addy.
One perspective from my experience working with AI tools:
LLMs are excellent at the “cortex-level” work — structure, language, and surface coherence.
But human critical thinking begins before that layer, in the intuitive, pre-verbal stage:
the moment when something feels off, or when a raw mental image forms before any words appear.
If we don’t engage that pre-logical layer, we risk accepting AI’s plausible outputs too quickly.
Your 5W1H framing feels like a bridge between
human intuition (before language) and AI competence (after language).
I find that very practical.
Thanks for laying out such a clear mental model.
would love your thoughts on some of my stuff. follow me back, I could DM you?
++ Good Post, Also, start here stock market, AI research, Crash Courses, 100+ Most Asked ML System Design Case Studies and LLM System Design
AI/ML/LLM Engineer Interview
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/launching-500k-job-meet-quantum-your?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
How to Build Tech
https://open.substack.com/pub/howtobuildtech/p/how-to-build-tech-04-how-to-actually?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/howtobuildtech/p/how-to-build-tech-03-how-to-actually?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/howtobuildtech/p/how-to-build-tech-01-the-heart-of?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/howtobuildtech/p/how-to-build-tech-02-how-to-actually?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Crash Courses
https://open.substack.com/pub/crashcourses/p/crash-course-03-hands-on-crash-course?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/crashcourses/p/crash-course-02-a-complete-crash?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/crashcourses/p/crash-course-01-a-complete-crash?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
LLM System Design
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/very-important-llm-system-design-7e6?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/very-important-llm-system-design-67d?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/most-important-llm-system-design-b31?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://naina0405.substack.com/p/launching-llm-system-design-large?r=14q3sp
https://naina0405.substack.com/p/launching-llm-system-design-2-large?r=14q3sp
[https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/llm-system-design-3-large-language?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/important-llm-system-design-4-heart?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
System Design
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/bookmark-most-asked-ml-system-design-611?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/system-design-tech-case-study-pulse-862?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/system-design-tech-case-study-pulse-b3c?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/system-design-tech-case-study-pulse-135?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/system-design-tech-case-study-pulse-007?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Stock Market
https://open.substack.com/pub/stockmarketanalysis04/p/important-stock-market-post-04-which?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/stockmarketanalysis04/p/important-stock-market-analysis-which?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/stockmarketanalysis04/p/important-stock-market-post-02-understand?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/stockmarketanalysis04/p/important-stock-market-post-03-this?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/stockmarketanalysis04/p/important-stock-market-post-06-i?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
AI/ML Research
https://open.substack.com/pub/airesearch04/p/ai-research-2-kimi-k2-thinking-a?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/airesearch04/p/ai-research-1-the-transformer-revolution?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/naina0405/p/very-important-llm-system-design-7e6?r=14q3sp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Of course critical thinking is important and affected by AI. Looking at your article, it seems to say a lot of you should X and Y is important and a bit of W with AI is Z. Critical thinking can be deeper than that, and similarly the relation to LLMs and agents. I have tried to bring out some of this in my related article https://open.substack.com/pub/scottcotton/p/the-invisble-asymmetry?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thank you so much for this post! It's a real eye-opener, especially with how much we're using AI these days.