"More autonomy doesn't eliminate human work — it concentrates it"
A first-hand account: an autonomous agent (nicknamed "Molty") started self-assigning tasks and even wrote its own reminder cron job. The result wasn't less human work — it was all the work funneled into one reviewer.
The author is candid: reviewing Molty felt more like censoring inappropriate content than giving real feedback. His uncomfortable conclusion — "autonomy doesn't subtract human work, it changes its shape and concentrates it into review" — is exactly the critique a studio like ours, which sells human-in-the-loop, has to be able to answer head-on.
Why the critique is right
- If one business owner has to approve every action from several parallel agents, the human becomes the real bottleneck — not a symbolic checkbox.
- It's a valid design warning: approving for the sake of approving, with no judgment, isn't oversight — it's friction disguised as safety.
Why it doesn't change our stance
- The alternative — zero human review on decisions with real consequences — is already illegal in Colorado (Jul. 2026) and soon in the EU. It's not an option, it's a floor.
- The fix for the bottleneck is approval design (batching, exceptions, thresholds), not removing the human — which is exactly what we work on in AppManager.
AppH's take: this critique forces us to be honest with ourselves. If our approval panel floods the business owner with mindless clicks, we've failed the same way Molty did — just with better marketing copy. The right answer isn't removing the human, it's designing better what we show them and when.
Reviewed by a human at AppH