Your AI Tools Are Only as Good as Your Judgment — And That's the Point

There's a quiet anxiety spreading through engineering teams right now: Am I becoming dependent on AI? Is my judgment atrophying? My take: that's the wrong question. The right one is whether you're using AI in a way that sharpens your judgment or replaces it. Those are genuinely different modes of use, and most engineers drift into the second one without noticing. The Dependency Trap Is Real - But Misdiagnosed The common critique is that AI tools make engineers lazy. I don't think that's it. The problem isn't laziness - it's abdication.