Sources
The “best articles” store, pointed at the human side of agentic engineering. Each page keeps a durable summary so the insight survives paywalls and link-rot: a metadata block, a three-bullet summary, the one reusable technique, a representative (verifiable) quote, and an explicit what this means for agentic engineering section.
These four are the seed canon — the works that most directly explain why supervising autonomous agents is cognitively harder than it looks.
Bainbridge — Ironies of Automation (1983) Automating the easy parts makes the human's remaining job harder, and monitoring is the worst task to leave a human.
Sheridan — Human Supervisory Control (1992) A vocabulary for how much you delegate: levels of automation and the human-supervisor relationship.
Leroy — Attention Residue (2009) Switching tasks leaves a residue of attention on the last one — the measurable cost of context-switching.
Csikszentmihalyi — Flow (1990) Focused immersion is a describable, protectable state — and interruptions are its enemy.
| Source | Year | Type | AM axis it informs | Actionable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bainbridge — Ironies of Automation | 1983 | paper | Autonomy / leash · Verification | 5 |
| Sheridan — Human Supervisory Control | 1992 | book | Autonomy / leash | 4 |
| Leroy — Attention Residue | 2009 | paper | (candidate) Cognitive ergonomics | 5 |
| Csikszentmihalyi — Flow | 1990 | book | (candidate) Cognitive ergonomics | 4 |