The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
March 9, 2026
I recently had a conversation with my colleague Douwe, who maintains the Pydantic AI framework and has been one of the most thoughtful people I know about integrating LLMs into open source workflows. He described waking up to thirty PRs every morning, each one pulled overnight by someone’s AI, and needing to make snap judgment calls on every single one. The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: “at that point, what am I still doing here?”.
The honest truth is that in the last few months, there have been days when I have spent close to two full days writing a plan for an LLM to execute: obsessively clarifying, specifying, re-specifying, only to have it still do something inexplicably stupid. Port a React hook into a Storybook story file. Read from the wrong plan. Invent components that don’t exist. And these aren’t errors of capability; they’re errors of coherence. The models are smart enough to produce plausible code, but not always smart enough to maintain a coherent intent across a complex change.
I think it’s worth reading personal accounts like this and others that we have posted recently of how people are responding as software engineers to the way in which our profession is transforming at an incredibly rapid pace.
I think the anxiety folks are feeling is real and understandable. I think the fatigue, the exhaustion that many are feeling, including me, is real. Seeing other people’s responses can perhaps normalise how we might be feeling ourselves.
