With critical thinking skills on the line I built a real-time AI collaborator, Thia — with vision and voice capabilities to keep early ideas raw, the loop tight, and the thinking mine. You don’t typically notice changes in your own behaviour until they become more pronounced. I recently found myself reaching all too quickly for LLMs to prompt on design problems I would have previously spent time digesting and sketching out solutions, now I was summoning up high-fidelity designs in seconds. Was I unintentionally outsourcing my thinking? So I built an app to not just reclaim my critical thinking, but strengthen it. Critical thinking is being outsourced The sheer flood of recent AI tools to design and build products has shown we’re spending less and less time doing the actual thinking as designers.…