Where to put the human in the loop
Humans bottleneck agents when HITL means inspecting outputs instead of managing outcomes.
I think a lot about how things work — ideas, systems, people — and how to make them better, bit by bit. This space is where I explore those thoughts, share what I’m building, and refine what I’m learning along the way.
Humans bottleneck agents when HITL means inspecting outputs instead of managing outcomes.
The AI Labor Playbook by Jules White is one of the clearest frameworks I’ve seen for how orgs should think about AI.
Some highlights:
AI is labor, not software. It doesn’t “run”, it works. And like any workforce, it needs to be led, trained, and deployed strategically.
Prompts = tasks. Tokens = wages. The “labor-to-token exchange” model is a powerful shift in thinking. You’re not using a tool, you’re hiring a temp.
Leading AI labor is a skill. It’s not just prompt engineering. It’s part comms, part systems thinking, part org design. Most people aren’t trained for it, but to stay competitive they must be. That’s the leverage we possess in the modern economy.
Language models are a trojan horse for a new type of software.
Natural language is becoming the new operating system, humanity’s native interface. Generative AI redefines software from a fixed tool to a dynamic collaborator.
Why it matters: The long-term shift isn’t AI replacing humans, it’s replacing traditional software. AI UX is the most significant design shift since the GUI. Rigid UX conventions like brittle menu structures will feel outdated. When interfaces adapt to us, those that don’t will be left behind.
The real bottleneck to progress is coordination, not knowledge.
We are not held back by a lack of good ideas. Humanity has had blueprints for energy abundance, clean water, nutrition, and education for decades. The deeper constraint is coordinated action. Incentive misalignment, local optima, and entrenched institutional power structures prevent execution. Most problems persist not because we don’t know how to solve them, but because we can’t agree to.
Why it matters: Breakthroughs will come less from novel inventions and more from novel coordination protocols, whether tech, legal, or cultural.
LLMs can be confidently wrong. That isn’t a bug — it’s a mirror.
They’re trained on human language, processed through neural networks modeled after the human brain. Of course they share our flaws — they’re made to communicate like us. Don’t try to use them as a truth machine. The leverage comes from the conversation - the space to think, reflect, and understand.