Humans are the bread in the sandwich, and the AI is in the middle.

That’s Dan Shipper on his podcast AI & I, talking with Every’s Kieran Klaassen, the engineer behind the compound engineering plugin. They’re working out where humans actually belong in an AI-driven workflow. It’s the same split showing up on the design side.

Klaassen, on the polish step at the end of the work:

The other moment comes at the end. Something comes out. How do you validate it? Well, it’s already tested—browser automated testing has clicked through everything, all the requirements are clearly specified, and it says everything works. But the beauty comes in when a human looks at it, clicks around, and has a feel for it: “Oh, this doesn’t feel right. We can polish it. We can make it better. There’s something still missing. We can make the design better.” […] all the way at the end, when everything is done, you can elevate everything and make it even better. And I think we need to do that, because if we don’t, it will all be slop—all the same. It’s very important to make it feel great because the bar is high, and the bar will always get higher.

“It will all be slop” is the line every team should have taped to a monitor. A passing test suite and a green PR don’t tell you whether the thing is actually any good. That judgment still lives with a human at the end of the workflow. Klaassen is correct that the bar keeps moving up, not down, and the teams who treat the polish step as optional are the ones whose products will look interchangeable in twelve months.

Klaassen, on the art-and-ownership argument:

But I do think that in the end, if you ship something—if you make a statement in the world—and you want it to be your own, you have to say yes or no at some point. You cannot fully automate everything. It’s a bit like making art. If you want it to be yours, it needs to come from you or somehow be connected. So I believe having those moments where you decide—where you choose what you enjoy—is so important. That’s why it’s so important to do things you enjoy and love.

Whatever your version of beautiful is, that’s the bread. Everything else is filling.