Working on rū's context capture flow surfaced a tradeoff I didn't expect to have to make so deliberately: agency over automation means choosing manual curation at the exact moments where automation would be easiest to justify.

The highlight is manual. The user decides what gets captured. The AI only enters after — drawing from what was chosen to remove one specific cognitive burden: reconstructing context from scratch at the moment you actually need it.

That sequence matters. Automation after intention feels like assistance. Automation before it feels like substitution.

Still sitting with what that means for this type of human-AI collaboration experience.

Building rū, I hit a fork early: let AI automatically categorize and connect every snippet I captured, or require myself to categorize on capture. The first option was obviously easier. The second introduced friction.

I chose the friction.

Not because automation was wrong, but because I noticed what happened when I categorized manually — I had to have an opinion. I had to pause, place the thought somewhere, commit to what it meant. That small act of engagement kept me inside my own thinking instead of outsourcing it.

The temptation to automate cognitive load is real and the pitch is seductive — who wouldn't want relief from the effort of organizing thought? But some friction isn't waste. It's the moment you're invited to figure something out, to question, to stay present with your own ideas. Remove it and you remove the thinking.

In the era of AI, designers need to stop treating friction purely as a symptom of bad UX. Intentional friction is a behavior design tool — one of the few levers we have left for keeping people genuinely engaged with their own cognition rather than just watching AI do it for them.

Work isn't just tasks completed. It's the medium through which we create meaning, organize ourselves, relate to others, contribute something. If we automate the structures through which meaning emerges––the struggle, the judgement, the figuring things out––we're not just making work more efficient. We're removing the substrate through which we make sense of ourselves.