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Do Not Outsource the Thinking

Attributed by dexter-horthy to Jake at Netflix:

"Do not outsource the thinking. You the engineer are an important part of this process and seek leverage."

Horthy's corollary: the goal of a coding agent is not to replace your reasoning but to amplify it. When users hand over the Spec and Plan phases to the model unchecked, they produce rework:

"You are shipping 50% more but half of that is just cleaning up the slop from last week."

Concrete practices

  • Read the code, not the plan file.
  • Keep the design discussion ~200 lines so resteering is cheap.
  • Use if statements for control flow; don't prompt the model to branch (control-flow-vs-prompt-flow).
  • Stay under the dumb-zone context-window threshold.

Why this matters

This is the same pattern Konstanty describes for evals (error-analysis-as-detective-work) and Ahmed describes for ops learning (correction-must-persist-compound-visible). Across three 2026 AI Engineer talks, the consensus is: wherever humans offload judgment wholesale, the system silently degrades. The fix isn't more automation — it's engineering the seam where humans resteer.

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