Operationalizing Zhu Qiuhan et al. & Jordan Gibbs: Trace synaptic agency, counter structural skill decay, and convert passive answer machines into cognitive scaffolding.
In cognitive workflows, each task routes through either human working memory or an external artificial intelligence coprocessor. Toggling stages like drafting from autonomous to dependent delegates structural generation, causing working effort to plummet from eighty to fifteen percent. When dependent offloading dominates, cognitive agency scores drop below fifty percent and friction slips beneath the critical point forty-five threshold. Across simulated ten-sprint horizons, insufficient cognitive friction accelerates structural skill decay by thirty-two percent unless scaffolded by active co-reasoning.