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The Human in the Loop · July 12 · 21 min

Incidental Learning Is Dying

Last week I closed a bug I never understood. The agent found it, fixed it, explained it. I read the explanation, nodded, shipped. Ten minutes. A year ago that same bug costs me an afternoon, and I come out understanding the subsystem. This time I understood nothing. I just had a green check. There is a name for what I lost. Incidental learning: the understanding that was never in the ticket. It was a side effect of doing the work. Here is the uncomfortable part. Your talent pipeline is a side effect of work you can now automate. No engineer picks the slow path on purpose. Not when the fast path ships today and the sprint ends Friday. So the learning does not come back on its own. Someone has to design it back in. But how are we manage to do that when we need to fulfill the expectations? #AIAgents #EngineeringLeadership #TheHumanInTheLoop

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Last week I closed a bug I never understood.

The agent found it, fixed it, explained it. I read the explanation, nodded, shipped. Ten minutes.

A year ago that same bug costs me an afternoon, and I come out understanding the subsystem. This time I understood nothing. I just had a green check.

There is a name for what I lost. Incidental learning: the understanding that was never in the ticket. It was a side effect of doing the work.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Your talent pipeline is a side effect of work you can now automate.

No engineer picks the slow path on purpose. Not when the fast path ships today and the sprint ends Friday. So the learning does not come back on its own. Someone has to design it back in.

But how are we manage to do that when we need to fulfill the expectations?

#AIAgents #EngineeringLeadership #TheHumanInTheLoop

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