Arjun Malhotra(@BadCapitalVC):It's interesting how when we talk about AI agents, we talk about the human being in the loop. But the human is actually the gap in the loop. An ideal agentic loop runs closed; to involve a person, it has to halt, freeze state, render it legible, pass it over, and sit there waiting before it starts again on a changed input. Despite this latency, I do think human-in-the-loop is a necessary evil for AI agents. Even trained on our own context and history, our internal agents land wrong roughly 2/10 times. And that's fine when the agent is drafting something, but not when it's set to do a task. So ideally, every human-involved checkpoint in the agentic process should buy you accuracy if it's costing you time.

2026.08.17 09:31

It's interesting how when we talk about AI agents, we talk about the human being in the loop. But the human is actually the gap in the loop. An ideal agentic loop runs closed; to involve a person, it has to halt, freeze state, render it legible, pass it over, and sit there waiting before it starts again on a changed input. Despite this latency, I do think human-in-the-loop is a necessary evil for AI agents. Even trained on our own context and history, our internal agents land wrong roughly 2/10 times. And that's fine when the agent is drafting something, but not when it's set to do a task. So ideally, every human-involved checkpoint in the agentic process should buy you accuracy if it's costing you time.