From “human in the loop” to “human with agent in the loop”

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. I’m reminded of a beautiful idea of Brian Marick’s that Ward Cunningham once implemented and demoed to me. Brian called it visible workings. Ward’s implementation made an Eclipse Foundation workflow visible. When the UI presented a form, it added an Explore button that you could use to inspect the business rule that motivated the form. Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into. — Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.” Thanks for still believing in RSS! If you'd like you can reply via email.