Presence Is Not Evidence
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Approval ceremonies in software delivery — PR reviews, required reviewers, CODEOWNERS — verify process compliance, not actual quality or judgment. Drawing on Deming's quality philosophy, the argument is that presence (the right person clicking approve) has been mistaken for evidence of real evaluation. AI agents that write, review, and deploy code expose this gap by producing typed, versioned, queryable evidence at every step, making the purely procedural nature of human approval visible. Human judgment remains irreplaceable for system design, threat modeling, and defining evaluation criteria — but that work belongs upstream in system architecture, not in the approval queue. The post also raises unresolved tensions: career disruption for those whose authority rested on presence, and the loss of learning-through-friction for the next generation of engineers.
