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Start free trial →Thoughtworks Technology Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Ford was building on a colleague's point that an AI agent can't be held accountable, so some decisions need a human. He warns that a human approver with no real chance to understand the change is there only as a scapegoat.
…That latter one is, as Effie hinted, quite exhausting. And, you know, after you've inspected one diff, that doesn't put you in any better position the next diff that comes along. Whereas if you have implemented a new kind of testing or some other kind of review process, then it's a virtuous cycle.
…your context. For example, with the regulatory burdens you're under, the sensitivity of the systems and data involved. But fundamentally, we should be having a human hitting the button whenever there's a need for accountability because we can make agents very smart. We cannot make them accountable.
To build on that, Effie, though, I think you already mentioned this, but human in the loop theater is a problem that we're seeing. So when you do have that need for human accountability, that human has to have the opportunity to absorb enough context to meaningfully make a decision. If the human is just there to press yes, then it's not genuinely human feedback. It's just an opportunity to shift blame onto that poor person who approved the unsafe change.
Something that you said earlier about making sure that you have well-defined tasks and you're splitting things up well, I think also comes back into play here because you can, and there are certainly different libraries of skills and other kinds of tooling that you can use that will help you to…
Yeah, well, I think there's some developers who don't really like to engage in analysis or value. And so it can be really tempting if that's the case for you, that you say, well, here's a bunch of documents. I don't really want to worry about what the backlog looks like or what the story breakdown…
I think also something we've cautioned against in this radar is surrendering too much of your own cognitive decision-making to agents, particularly around heavyweight frameworks for methodologies for software development with agents. I think it's very important that you make the workflows that your…