The Design Choice Nobody Is Talking About
A company called Brilliant just launched an AI tutor named Koji — and it is built around a principle that every leader needs to understand: AI critical thinking skills are what separate the professionals who thrive from those who don’t.
Their announcement stopped me cold.
“AI is making kids dumber. It should be making them geniuses.”
Seven words. And they are correct.
The problem is not AI. The problem is how almost every AI tool being handed to students right now is designed. And the lesson hidden inside that design choice applies to every organization deploying AI today, not just parents, not just schools.
Let me show you what I mean.
What Every Other Tool Gets Wrong
A student is working through a geometry problem. She shifts a circle up one unit, then moves it left when it should go right.
Every standard AI tool, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, gives her the answer.
Problem solved. Moving on.
Except the problem was not solved. The answer was provided. Those are not the same thing.
Koji refuses to give her the answer.
Instead, it watches every move she makes. It sees exactly where she went wrong. It draws test points on her canvas and asks her to explain her thinking. It coaches her through the logic until she solves it herself.
Here is how Brilliant describes the difference:
“Other AI tools would have given you the answer, making you dumber. Koji knows your brain needs to think to develop the skill, so he coaches you to solve the problem yourself.”
One tool builds the answer. The other builds the thinker.
That distinction, right there, is the entire argument for the TALENT ingredient of the 5 Ingredient Kryptonite Defense.
The Vibe Code Warning and AI Critical Thinking Skills.
Brilliant went further. They addressed coding directly.
Koji does not teach students to write code.
Because, as they put it bluntly: AI writes the code now.
Instead, Koji teaches students to understand code. To read it. To debug it. To catch the machine when it produces something that runs but does not do what was intended.
Their language is precise: “Your classmates who only know how to vibe code will be unemployable, because they don’t know how to think.”
“Vibe coding,” prompting AI to produce code you cannot explain, debug, or govern, is spreading through the profession the same way that outsourcing judgment spread through previous generations of knowledge workers. It feels like speed. It produces dependency.
The student who can only vibe code is not a coder. They are a prompt operator with no foundation beneath them.
And when the AI produces something wrong, which it does, consistently, they have no capacity to catch it.
AI Critical Thinking Skills: Not Just a Parenting Story
Every leader reading this right now is making the same design choice Brilliant just identified, whether they realize it or not.
When you give your team an AI tool that produces the deliverable, you win the quarter. Your team moves faster. Output increases. The metric looks good.
And you are building the exact dependency Brilliant is warning parents about.
Your team becomes the corporate equivalent of the student who can only vibe code. They can operate the tool. They cannot govern it. They cannot catch it when it is wrong. They cannot produce the judgment that the tool cannot replicate.
The MIT research we covered in an earlier post found that AI made the top scientists 44% more productive — while doing almost nothing for lower performers. The gap was not access to the tool. Everyone had access. The gap was the depth of thinking the professional brought to the tool.
Depth of thinking is not something AI gives you. It is something you build before AI arrives, or you build alongside it, deliberately, the way Koji does.
The 5 Ingredient Kryptonite Defense in a Classroom
What makes the Koji story remarkable is that it demonstrates all five ingredients simultaneously, in a $1 per day tutoring app.
IDEAS. Koji starts from a contrarian insight: the tool that looks helpful, the one that gives the answer, is actually the most harmful. That reframe is the IDEAS ingredient: generating thinking that others miss because they are too focused on the obvious solution.
SPEED. The best human tutors used to cost $300 per hour. Access was limited to families who could afford them. Koji costs less than $1 per day and has already reached 10 million learners across 5,000 schools. The SPEED ingredient is not about moving fast. It is about building the capability to deliver value at a scale and pace that changes the competitive landscape. Koji just democratized access to elite tutoring at a speed no human tutor network could match.
TALENT. This is the core of everything Koji does. Not teaching the answer. Teaching the thinker. Building the capacity to reason, to catch errors, to govern the tool rather than depend on it. The professionals who will thrive in the AI era are not the ones who learned to use AI fastest. They are the ones who built the thinking that AI cannot replicate, and then added AI fluency on top of that foundation.
DISTINCTION. Koji is recognizably exceptional. In a market crowded with AI tools that all do essentially the same thing, generate the answer faster, Brilliant made a deliberate choice to do the opposite. That choice is visible, defensible, and impossible to copy without abandoning the entire model every competitor has built. That is DISTINCTION: not being different for its own sake, but being so clearly built around a principle that your competition cannot follow without becoming you.
LEADERSHIP AT ALL LEVELS. The parents who understand this distinction are making a leadership decision. So are the principals choosing curriculum tools. So are the executives choosing which AI platforms to deploy for their teams. Leadership at all levels does not mean everyone has a title. It means everyone in the chain, parent, teacher, manager, executive, is making choices that either build capacity or build dependency. Koji is proof that the choice matters.
What This Means for Your Organization Right Now
You are making the Koji decision every time you deploy an AI tool for your team. Building AI critical thinking skills is the difference between a team that directs AI and a team that depends on it.
The question is not which tool is fastest. Every tool is faster than a human doing the same task without AI.
The question is: does this tool build the thinking capacity of the people using it, or does it replace it?
The organizations that get this right will have teams that are faster and sharper, because their people are directing AI from a foundation of genuine capability.
The organizations that get it wrong will have teams that are faster today and dependent tomorrow, unable to catch the machine when it produces something wrong, unable to govern what they cannot understand, unable to adapt when the tool changes.
We have written about the engineers who are thriving in the AI era, the ones commanding premium compensation and growing demand. Every one of them shares something in common, they brought deep conceptual understanding to the tool. They did not arrive empty and ask the tool to fill them.
Koji is building that kind of professional. At scale. For less than a dollar a day.
The question for every leader reading this, what are you building?
The One Question Worth Asking This Week
Walk through the AI tools your organization is currently using or evaluating — and ask which ones are genuinely building AI critical thinking skills.
For each one, ask: does this tool produce the output, or does it develop the person?
You do not have to eliminate the output tools. Speed matters. Efficiency matters.
But if every tool in your stack is an answer machine, you are building a team of vibe coders, and Brilliant just told you exactly where that leads.
The TALENT ingredient is the capacity to build and protect human capability that AI cannot easily replicate.
It does not happen by accident. It does not happen because you gave your team access to good tools.
It happens because someone in your organization made the same choice Brilliant made: to build the thinker, not just deliver the answer.
Those prepared need not fear the forces at work.
Where Do You Stand?
The Kryptonite Scorecard™ measures your organization’s readiness across all five ingredients, including TALENT. Thirty behaviors. Fifteen minutes. A personalized action plan that shows you specifically where you are prepared and where you are vulnerable.
Take it at realmikeevans.com/scorecard.
Distinct or Extinct: Future-Proofing People and Organizations in the Age of AI is available now on Amazon.