When you hand a task to a copilot agent and it comes back with something plausible but slightly off, the tempting move is to tweak the output and ship it. What's harder to notice is the slow erosion happening to your own mental model of the task — you stop holding the problem fully in your mind because you've outsourced the holding. The philosopher Michael Polanyi called this 'tacit knowledge': the embodied understanding that lives in the doing, not the describing. A surgeon who only reads procedure notes and never operates loses something that can't be recovered by reading more notes. The practical implication for working with AI agents isn't about checking outputs more carefully — it's about periodically doing the full task yourself, by hand, so that what you delegate stays within your competence rather than drifting outside it.

What is the opposite of what you're currently doing about staying fluent in the tasks your agents handle for you?

Drawing from Epistemology / Philosophy of Knowledge — Michael Polanyi