CONCEPT
Dependency Audit
The periodic assessment of a user's independent capability without AI assistance—the only reliable measure of whether tool use is building human storage strength or substituting for expertise that is not developing.
The dependency audit is the diagnostic intervention that Bjork's framework logically requires: periodically removing the AI tool and measuring what the user can do without it. The procedure is simple—administer a performance assessment under conditions where AI assistance is unavailable and compare the result to the user's baseline capability (before AI adoption) or to a matched peer's performance (with and without AI). The comparison reveals the magnitude of dependency: the gap between AI-augmented performance and independent capability. A small gap indicates the tool is augmenting a growing foundation; a large or widening gap indicates the tool is substituting for capability that is not developing. The audit is not punitive but diagnostic—like measuring unassisted blood pressure to determine whether medication is treating a condition or merely masking it. It answers the question that no performance metric captures: what has this person actually learned during the period of AI-assisted work?
In The You On AI Field Guide
The audit addresses a failure in how AI