When you hand a task to an AI agent and walk away, something subtle happens: you stop thinking about it. Not just the task — the underlying problem. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides warned that outsourcing moral reasoning to authority, even wise authority, produces a kind of intellectual atrophy he called 'taqlid' — blind following that quietly hollows out your own judgment. The parallel for copilot agents is real: the more fluently they handle your workflows, the more your own mental model of those workflows can fade. The practical move isn't to use agents less — it's to periodically reconstruct, in your own words, what the agent is actually doing and why. That friction is the exercise that keeps your judgment sharp.

Pick one task a copilot agent handles for you. Can you explain, right now, every decision it makes in completing it — and why those decisions are the right ones?

Drawing from Jewish Philosophy — Moses Maimonides