Simon Willison — 2026-06-28#
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The standout thought today is a philosophical shift on AI-assisted programming via Jon Udell, challenging the phrase “human in the loop”. It’s a crucial perspective for developers—framing autonomous tools as “agents in our loop” rather than black boxes, ensuring we maintain our engineering authority.
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Quoting Jon Udell
Simon highlights a thought-provoking quote from Jon Udell about how we frame AI-assisted development. Udell pushes back against the standard “human in the loop” terminology, arguing that it inherently surrenders authority to the machine. Instead, he advocates for an “agent in the loop” approach where developers maintain their standard workflows and simply invite agentic software in to assist. It is a necessary reminder to treat generative AI as a tool that serves the engineering team, rather than an unreviewable black box that just takes prompts and emits features.