Do not let AI make your decisions for you
A product chief who trains AI says use it for execution, but guard your judgment like your attention.
20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mercor Head of Product on Revenue Concentration from Frontier LabsWhen asked how people can hold on to thinking and creativity when so many are already hooked on AI, Oswald Nitski, head of product at Mercor, compared AI use to phone use.
Phones “kind of fry your brain, they turn it into goop,” Nitski said, adding that he uses his phone all the time and has had to learn where the boundary is. He warned the same risk applies to AI when people hand over judgment.
At work, he argued, the boundary is between execution on one side and judgment and decision-making on the other. Execution can go to a model, but a person has to stay paranoid and double-check everything, because models make you think they are doing the right thing. His rule for his team is, “Don’t delegate your decision-making, like your actual job, to a model because you’re going to lose that ability.”
That distinction shapes how Mercor hires. Candidates first use an AI agent to produce an artifact, to show they are fluent with the tools. Then the interview moves to whiteboarding, where candidates have to design experiments that actually reveal information, show they understand statistics, and talk through systems design.
Nitski said the reason is that AI tools make it very easy to offload thinking and just repeat what comes out of Claude, a popular AI chatbot. He said finding useful tests to try, and showing that product changes moved the business forward, is now much of his product team’s core job.
Questions people ask
How do I actually keep that line between execution and judgment?
Use AI to produce a first draft, a summary, or code, then review it like work from a confident junior colleague. Make the final choice yourself, and write down in one sentence why you chose it. If you cannot explain the why without the chatbot, you delegated too much.
Does using AI really weaken thinking, or is that just a metaphor?
Yes, in small doses. Studies find people can become less likely to do hard mental work when an assistant is available, and skills fade when they are not practiced. The effect is stronger for exactly the tasks you fully hand over, like writing, analysis, and decisions.