A CTO posted something on r/ExperiencedDevs a few weeks ago that really hit home. His team had leaned hard on AI coding tools, and he wanted to know what it was doing to people's actual command of their own work. The reply that got the most traction, from another engineer: "the mental model atrophy is real, but the bigger tell for me is when i can't explain my own code without re-reading it — feels like i outsourced the memory, not just the typing."
Nobody in that thread was coasting on purpose. These are engineers who cared enough to post about it in public, under their own scrutiny, and still couldn't fully stop it from happening. Whatever that is, it isn't a discipline problem.
"I can't explain my own code without re-reading it. I outsourced the memory, not just the typing."
The Coordination Problem, One Layer Deeper
I also recently read a LinkedIn post that's one of the better articulations I've found of the world those engineers are living in — Andres Spitzer, CEO of Civitatis, a 400-person travel company that's told its board it'll be running 4,000 agents within the year (today it's 35 in production, 80 more testing). His argument, in one line: "the bottleneck is no longer intelligence, it's coordination." He's also more careful about this than most people writing about AI right now — he says plainly that accountability is a human property, and that an agent is never the final decision on anything that matters. I don't disagree with any of it. It's a sharper version of something I've been saying with different words for some time now — hiring the right agent, or the right person, was never the constraint. Nobody owning the outcome end to end was.
Spitzer's fix is architectural: design the workflow, put a human gate at the specific places where judgment actually needs to happen (his own number, from 47 workflows in production, is 1.8 gates per workflow), and let the agents run the rest. That's good advice, and it's actually similar to what we did in a recent engagement to tighten our own coordination gap too. What his framework doesn't cover is a real, separate question, one layer down from design: once the gate is built and a human is standing at it, does that human still have the context in their own brain to actually exercise judgment there?
Spitzer answers this about himself without quite meaning to, in a way I suspect he'd wince at if he read it back. He built his own agent to run his inbox and prep his board meetings, and he writes that it's kept him from ever again losing a decision the way things used to slip through the cracks between a hallway conversation and his calendar. He trusts that, and he's probably right to, mostly. But notice what the claim assumes — that reading a prepared brief keeps him exactly as close to the material as doing the work himself used to. That's precisely the assumption that's hard to pressure-test, because from inside it, staying briefed and staying internalized feel identical. They aren't.
I've started calling this the Agentic Fog. It isn't a governance problem and it isn't a capability gap. It's what happens when you can generate output faster than you can internalize it — and internalizing it was the thing that let you catch a problem, apply judgment, or even know what guardrail to build in the first place.
What the Fog Actually Looks Like
I've been building an agentic tool this summer for a client — it scans grant opportunities, runs a fit assessment, and drafts the actual application. It's about as good a showcase for agentic work as I've built.
Partway through the build, the thing wanted more room to run — provision its own API keys, execute a step on its own between our working sessions, without either of us watching. The person leading the build stopped it cold: "It wants to have these things that are executing independently, and I just try to keep reining it in — we're building everything where you and I can do it right here in the session."
We gave up real velocity holding that line. The agent could have moved faster unsupervised. The moment it steps outside a session both of us are actually watching, neither of us can say with a straight face that we know what it built or why. Holding the line costs us short term speed. It was worth it to avoid rework and backtracking down the line.
One of the people I mentor (mentoring is something I fell into almost by accident, and apparently I'm decent at it, because people keep coming back) got caught in the fog directly, not adjacent to it. His daily updates were already agentic: the agent pulled the status together, he read it, moved on. Then his CEO asked him a couple of direct questions in a meeting — status, priorities — and he didn't have answers. By his own account it looked bad. He'd been reading the output. He hadn't internalized it.
His fix was small and almost embarrassingly low-tech: a daily five-minute touch point with two people on his team, just talking, no report attached — the one thing the agent genuinely couldn't do for him. The agentic updates stayed exactly as they were. He layered a human habit on top of them, specifically because the agent could hand him the facts but couldn't make him actually hold onto them. Now, in his words, any question, any time — he's got an answer.
That's the whole shape of the fog in miniature. The output was right there, generated on schedule, and it still wasn't enough — reading a status update and internalizing it are two different acts, and only one of them shows up when the CEO catches you in the hallway. My own version runs the same way (not so different from Spitzer's): I have an agentic process every day that pulls from transcripts, email, and DMs and flags what's going on, and it's genuinely useful. It's also not the thing that lets me answer a hard question cold. That's still on me, same as it's now on him.
That's the same pattern underneath all these stories, and I think it's the one most "use AI responsibly" advice misses. The real risk is that the human running the agent loses the ability to say, in plain language, what it actually did — because the volume moved faster than anyone's attention could keep up. It shows up whether you're being careless or genuinely trying to stay on top of things. Speed doesn't discriminate.
The Question Worth Asking This Week
That hallway question is the actual test, and it's worth being precise about what it's testing. Not whether you can pull up a dashboard — whether you can answer without checking your agent at all. If you're running point on delivery: can you talk through the current status, priorities, blockers, and next steps off the top of your head, or do you need to go ask your agent first? If you're building the product itself: can you explain, in a nutshell, how it actually works and what problem it's solving, without opening anything?
This isn't a new kind of embarrassment. The CEO stopping you in the hallway and getting "let me check with my team" back was always a bad moment — you're supposed to know. What's new is the volume. There's simply more delegated to agents than there is delegated to people, which means more of it can drift out of your head before you even notice it's gone. The machine makes it genuinely tempting to let go of the wheel entirely, because it's so easy to just let it run. Pilots have a name for the version of this that actually kills people: spatial disorientation — flying with total confidence in a direction that's completely wrong, because the instruments say so and your gut's gone quiet. Staying out of the fog takes the unglamorous, everyday version of that same discipline. No agent can do it for you.
Post-AI, the volume is bigger. The deer-in-headlights moment isn't rarer. It's more likely.
I'm not going to tell you how to build that visibility back — every team's agentic setup looks different, and the fix that works for a 400-person company running dozens of shared agents isn't the fix that works for a ten-person product team running three. What I'll say is that the fog doesn't lift because you bought better tooling for it. Telemetry can tell you the agent ran. It can't tell you whether you could explain what it did without asking it again.
AI didn't invent the accountability gap I've been writing about all year. It just made it move fast enough that you can lose track of it in a single sprint instead of a single quarter.
This is also why the governance advice going around right now — name an owner, build a guardrail, put a review gate here — is both correct and not sufficient on its own. Every one of those fixes requires someone to already know enough to decide where the gate goes, what the guardrail should catch, and when the owner's judgment should override the agent's output. That's exactly the capacity the fog takes away first. You cannot govern what you no longer understand, and you cannot exercise judgment on a system you've stopped internalizing. The guardrails Spitzer and others are right to recommend are downstream of getting out of the fog, not a solution for it.
Somebody still has to be standing close enough to the machine to notice when the fog's rolled in — and that was never going to be the org chart's job. It's the Operator Seat's.