Don't Build Agents You Can't Explain
addyosmani · x · 2026-07-16
In his closing keynote, Addy Osmani emphasized: do not build Agents you cannot take responsibility for explaining.
Key points include:
- Roles/titles < system ownership: Rather than giving someone an "AI-flavored" job title, it is more important to clarify who is accountable for the system's outcomes.
- Quoting Mitchell Hashimoto: when the "speed of generation" exceeds the "speed of understanding," the scarce resource becomes evidence-based judgment.
- His proposed new rule is: "Explain it, or don't ship it."
The post focuses less on specific tools and more on accountability, judgment, and explainability in Agent products and team practices.
Related event: Addy Osmani: Engineers Must Be Accountable for Agent Systems(3 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Chaining dependent MCP tool calls: no rollback, duplicate risk — agentrsdg · 2026-09-11
- Agent-built classifier labels 192k docs for $0.70 vs $13-26 with frontier LLMs — vanstriendaniel · 2026-09-11
- MathModelAgent gains traction: auto-solves math modeling and writes a submission-ready paper — jihe520 · 2026-09-11
- alphaXiv open-sources OpenResearch to run parallel research agents with any model — alphaXiv · 2026-09-11
- DeskcommCRM: open-source AI sales CRM with native agents and WhatsApp hits 1k stars — melgarafael · 2026-09-11
- hyperresearch: agent-driven knowledge base that turns web research into a searchable wiki — jordan-gibbs · 2026-09-11