The Recognition Problem
Standing to Reject
Agent success now depends less on completing tasks than on whether every counterparty with standing to reject recognizes the action as authorized.
Builder Profile
Alexandre Drouin and the Tightening Definition of "Done"
Drouin's projects trace how agent evaluation evolved from checking task completion to verifying that outcomes are grounded, cited, and structurally real. The progression reveals a field learning that the hardest problem is not capability but verifiability.
Review-Shaped Work
The Infrastructure for Arguing Back
Durable agent adoption depends less on AI capability than on whether a domain already has organizational infrastructure for humans to contest, evaluate, and reverse the output before the cost of errors falls on the wrong people.
Evidence and Roles
Review-Shaped Work
When agents handle routine work, human responsibility doesn't diminish. It concentrates into higher-stakes review that demands context, authority, and genuine organizational redesign. Without those, oversight becomes decorative.
Evidence and Roles
The Clerk Pattern
Production agents across security, coding, and commerce keep converging on one architecture: scoped authority producing artifacts for human review, not autonomous action. The pattern works, until the interaction itself is the product.
Metaphor Shift
The Clerk, Not the Copilot
AI agents aren't maturing toward peer-like collaboration. They're gaining institutional admissibility as clerks, and the price of admission is forcing organizations to make rules explicit that should have been explicit all along.
