An Anthropic engineer warns about 'cognitive surrender' as AI agents take over his work

Bloomberg/Getty Images Anthropic engineer Addy Osmani warned about "cognitive surrender" among coders. "Nothing in my day-to-day forces critical thinking on me," he wrote, citing AI agents as the culprit. Osmani advocated for picking selectively where to offload — and where to ask follow-up questions. Addy Osmani is thinking hard about thinking. Osmani works on the Claude Code team at Anthropic. The company is all in on agentic coding — he helps create its AI coding product, after all — and has reduced human code writing . "Increasingly, nothing in my day-to-day forces critical thinking on me now that so much of my work runs through agents," Osmani wrote in a Tuesday X essay. Engineers have expressed similar concerns in the last year: AI has turned them more into operators than builders. One OpenAI alum told Business Insider that AI coding was tedious and boring.