The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired<br>Get in touch<br>Get in touch<br>Log in

\n\n[Marcelo](https://github.com/kludex), another Pydantic colleague, when asked about his Claude Code session freezing said: _\"just open 5 claude sessions. You'll never notice because you're busy giving feedback to the others.\"_ He was joking. I think. But it captures something true about the current moment. The parallelism is exhilarating and kind of feral. The number of things you can _start_ has dramatically increased. The number of things you can thoughtfully finish hasn't changed at all, because that part still requires the one resource we can't parallelise: your brain.\n\nHere's a term for what I think is happening: **the human reward function problem**. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what _good_ looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated those dopamine hits and replaced it with the cognitive load of review and supervision. The satisfying part shrank. The exhausting part grew. And there are no new rewards to fill the gap.\n\nIf you're feeling like your work is simultaneously more productive _and_ less satisfying, you're not broken. The feedback loop is broken. And I think we need to start treating that as an engineering problem in its own right, not a personal failure.\n\nIt's also, frankly, quite lonely. Programming with an LLM is an intensely solitary activity.\n\nYou and the machine, going back and forth, refining and prompting and reviewing. The natural moments where you'd turn to a colleague to ask a question, to rubber-duck a problem, to share the small victory of something finally clicking. Those moments get quietly replaced by another prompt. In a team without a strong existing culture of collaboration, this has a tendency to further separate people, to chill communication at precisely the moment when you most need the reassurance that other humans are finding this hard too.\n\nAnd it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse. Sometimes you get something brilliant, sometimes garbage, and you never quite know which. Textbook [Skinner Box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber). It can be genuinely hard to step back and remember that you're allowed to just... write code. But switching between LLM-assisted and manual work is jarring and uncomfortable, two very different modes of thinking, and it takes a kind of maturity and confidence to give yourself permission to switch.\n\n## Breakpoints\n\nThis moment brings to mind the fear and angst caused by responsive design. I was working as a designer and frontend developer at the time, following [Ethan Marcotte](https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/) and the [Zeldman](https://zeldman.com/2024/12/05/of-books-and-conferences-past/) / [A Book Apart](https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/responsive-web-design/) crowd like everyone else, and I remember how unsettling it felt to be told that the fixed-width layouts we'd all mastered were basically over.\n\nFor the younger devs: there was a genuine cultural moment around 2009 when websites moved from fixed, pixel-perfect, magazine-style layouts to fluid, responsive ones. And designers _hated_ it. The loss of control was existential for people whose entire identity was built around precise layouts and perfect grids. You're telling me the user might see my design at _any_ width? On _any_ device? That the layout I crafted would... _flow?_\n\n\n\n> Image design by [Jyotika Sofia Lindqvist](https://www.behance.net/jyotikasofia)\n\nThe resistance was intense. And it was understandable. People had built real expertise in a paradigm that was being fundamentally disrupted. The designers who thrived through that transition were the ones who reframed their skills. The eye for proportion still mattered. The understanding of hierarchy still mattered. The craft didn't die, it evolved. What became less relevant was the obsession with pixel-level control. What became more relevant was understanding systems, adaptability, and designing for uncertainty.\n\nI don't want to oversell this parallel. Responsive design played out over years. The current shift is measured in months. Agencies lost clients and designers lost gigs over the responsive transition, but it didn't carry the same existential dread. The stakes are materially different, and the pace is genuinely exhausting in a way that the responsive transition never was. But the underlying pattern, of craft evolving rather than dying, of the core skills mattering more not less, I think that holds.\n\nWorking with LLMs on code feels like a similar inflection point. The skill isn't gone, it's shifting. You're not less of an engineer because you didn't hand-write every line. But you do still need to know what good looks...