Developmental Design

Developmental design is Winograd's third and deepest principle for AI collaboration: the interaction should leave the human more capable over time, not less. A tool supporting understanding makes users better at work; a tool replacing understanding makes users dependent—faster at producing results but less capable of evaluating them, less equipped to work without the tool, less able to exercise independent judgment that gives the tool's output value. The language interface presents this developmental question with unusual sharpness: a developer generating code without understanding it has produced output but not deposited understanding. The output may be correct; the developer may lack capacity to evaluate correctness because understanding that would enable evaluation was bypassed in production. Over hundreds of iterations, pragmatic competence rises while foundational comprehension erodes—a pattern Winograd's framework demands designers address through deliberate preservation of formative friction.