You Are the Bread of the AI Sandwich

Dan Shipper and Kieran Klaassen discussed, on the podcast AI & I, where humans fit in an era when AI can produce code, copy, strategy, and even design. Their conclusion was that AI workflows should be seen as a sandwich, where the model handles the execution in the middle and humans handle the framing and judgment on either side.

Kieran's compound engineering divides engineering into four stages: Plan-Work-Review-Compound. AI mainly handles Work, while humans have strengths in Plan, where they decide how to define the problem, and Review, where they judge whether the results are right.

• Humans can come up with multiple solutions to a single problem at the same time, but this is a weak point for agents.
• In the final stage, taste—judging whether the result matches the vision—becomes important, and this is what distinguishes it from generic slop.

In the latter part, the case of Every's AI agent Claudie is introduced. It originally started as a project manager, but as more features were added it kept exceeding expectations, growing into a personalized assistant that now also handles slide deck creation and the sales pipeline. Dan predicted that going forward, both a model where everyone uses their own dedicated agent and a model with a single super-agent equipped with department-specific plugins will develop together.