The Humans Are the Bottleneck: And What We Built to Put Them Back in the Right Loop

Session Overview

We spent two years making code generation almost free, and our companies barely got faster. That's not a tooling problem — it's a people problem we've been refusing to name. The bottleneck was never typing the code; it was the humans around it: who owns what, who verifies, who's accountable when an agent confidently ships the wrong thing.

This talk argues that AI didn't create the coordination gap in our orgs — it turned a spotlight on one that was always there. We'll look at why non-technical teammates are usually right to distrust a flawless-looking demo, how the unit of review is climbing from lines to diffs to specs, and why your tests are quietly becoming your primary specification.

Then a live look at Kimchi, where a human-and-agent team coordinates itself, automates the toil, and stops — on purpose — at the one decision that still needs a name attached to it.