Human-in-the-Loop Verification for Coding Agents
Why serious coding agents need evidence handoff, calibrated uncertainty, and human review points.
Coding agents should not try to erase human judgment. They should make that judgment sharper.
A useful agent can collect runtime evidence, run tests, inspect the browser, compare screenshots, and explain the remaining uncertainty. Then a human can review a grounded packet of evidence instead of reconstructing the whole story from scratch.
Evidence Beats Confidence
Confidence is cheap. Evidence is expensive. That is exactly why the tool should do the expensive part.
For UI work, evidence might mean screenshots, accessibility tree snapshots, DOM state, console logs, network failures, visual diffs, and links back to the source that produced the behavior.
The Human Review Point
Human-in-the-loop verification should not be a vague approval button at the end.
It should be a designed review point where the system says: here is what I changed, here is what I observed, here is what still looks risky, and here is the smallest next action I recommend.