CONCEPT
Commitment Visibility
The design principle that AI-generated contributions should be accepted through explicit acts of conscious endorsement rather than passive absorption—building friction at acceptance, not generation.
Commitment visibility is the first principle of Winograd's design philosophy for AI collaboration: when a human user accepts an AI-generated contribution (a passage, a code block, an architectural decision), the acceptance should be an explicit act—a moment of conscious endorsement rather than passive absorption into the work. The design creates friction at the point of incorporation, not at the point of generation. Let the machine generate freely, let output flow, but build into practice a moment where the human evaluates against their own understanding and makes a deliberate choice to incorporate, modify, or reject. This is not interface enforcement but cultural practice—the organizational and personal structures that preserve the human's role as directing intelligence even when the tool achieves transparency.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The principle addresses the specific risk of readiness-to-hand in conversational AI: when the tool disappears into the user's natural language, when the interface achieves transparency so complete that the machine's contributions feel like the user's own thinking, the tool's influence becomes invisible. The