People
The human-factors canon behind this wiki was built long before agents, mostly in aviation, process control, and cognitive psychology. This section collects the field’s thinkers so you can trace an idea back to its source. It starts with the four canon authors; individual deep-dive pages can follow as the wiki grows.
The seed canon
Section titled “The seed canon”-
Lisanne Bainbridge — human-factors researcher whose 1983 paper Ironies of Automation is the field’s most-cited text on why automating a task makes the human’s remaining job harder. The direct ancestor of the supervision paradox in autonomous coding.
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Thomas B. Sheridan — MIT engineer who defined human supervisory control and, with Verplank, the levels-of-automation scale. He gave us the vocabulary for how much to delegate — the theory under AM’s autonomy/leash axis.
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Sophie Leroy — organizational researcher who named and measured attention residue (2009): the finding that switching tasks leaves part of your attention stuck on the last one. The clearest explanation of why juggling concurrent agent sessions degrades judgment.
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — psychologist who described flow (1990), the state of focused immersion, and the conditions that create and destroy it. The case for protecting focus blocks while orchestrating.
These four are the seed. As the wiki grows, expect per-person pages collecting each researcher’s key works and how they connect to agentic practice — the same shape as the Who to Learn From watchlist on the engineering side.