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Steering climbs higher
Steering has already climbed in altitude. It began at the level of writing a line of code and pressing Tab, moved to directing something more comprehensive, and may reach the level of goals or higher.
Direction stays human
Choosing the direction stays with a person. Data informs it, but much of it is an opinionated call: intuition, or a wish for what the product and the world should look like, even though the opposite strategy could be just as viable.
Loops and shared steering
Loops, where an agent runs for longer toward a defined success, are a big step, and the person still steers. Steering can also be shared. Teammates join the exchange between a person and an agent, and a group steers a group of agents together.
Why do pilots steer while autopilot flies?
Lawrence Sperry demonstrated a gyroscopic autopilot in Paris in 1914, flying past the judges with his hands raised while his mechanic walked out on the wing. Later autopilots took over steady flight, and the pilot's job moved to setting course, monitoring, and handling the unexpected. The same split appears whenever a machine takes over a repeatable task, and the human work climbs toward goals. Modern airliners fly most of a long flight under autopilot.
How did autocomplete grow into agents?
GitHub Copilot opened as a technical preview in June 2021, suggesting the next line of code as a developer typed. It became generally available in June 2022 and was built on a model from OpenAI called Codex. Later tools took on whole tasks across many files, with the developer reviewing the result instead of typing it. GitHub's own 2022 experiment reported that developers using Copilot finished a test task 55 percent faster.
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