Forget humans “in” the loop. Harness engineering puts humans “on” the loop.

AI has us quickly forgetting humans as the software delivery loop. Now, forget humans in the loop. For Thoughtworks’ distinguished engineer Kief Morris, we need to pay more attention to the human on the loop to keep defining what is good code and what are good systems.

“If you’re using AI to build software, you need to make sure that you’re building production-ready software, and I think the default approaches that people are taking right now don’t include” these engineering best practices, Morris told The New Stack during PlatformCon in London last month.

“Even if you’re not giving the agents free rein, you have to be building into your process [and] you have to be thinking about how to use agents to help you do that in a safe way, and that can’t wait; that’s not like future-pie-in-the-sky,” Morris said. “That’s something you have to do now.”

At the speed of AI, organizations have to focus a lot less on speed to deploy, and a lot more on the guardrails that ensure what you are deploying is safe, secure, and of high quality. Fortunately, that solution goes back to the software delivery best practices that have been accepted for more than a decade now. But only if your CI/CD pipeline is production-ready.

What is “good” anymore, anyway?

The question on the minds of many right now is how to get more out of their AI agents, but, as Morris explored that idea at PlatformCon in London, he noted that we need to step back from what the agents are doing to ask these questions first: “What does that mean for us? How do we keep controlling this?”

Morris is worried that we’ve delegated so much of the code building to AI agents that we’ve become distant from the details of what they’re building, which has us losing track of making sure the AI is building things well.

“That means we get better at defining good, and I don’t think we’ve been really good at this.”

“That means we get better at defining good, and I don’t think we’ve been really good at this,” Morris said in his…