The five standard anchors
Human Anchors are the responsibilities a team deliberately does not automate, even when AI technically could. They capture where the human element is preserved, and they are written down so they do not quietly disappear.
- Customer contact and problem discovery
- Humans talk to users and decide which problem is worth solving. AI may summarise and analyse, but it does not sit at the table.
- Irreversible decisions
- Architecture, data models, public APIs and pricing are decided by humans, with AI as an advisor.
- The release decision
- Every release has a named human who signs off.
- Ethics, privacy and security trade-offs
- AI flags, a human weighs.
- Mentoring and team rituals
- Retros, one-on-ones and knowledge transfer stay person to person.
Each team adds its own anchors to this list, for example a domain where trust weighs extra heavily.
Protecting craft
Anyone judging AI work must keep mastering the craft themselves. Four agreements make that happen.
Explain-back
Nobody approves something they cannot explain.
Hand flight
A fixed weekly block in which Pilots build, debug or design without AI, so their own judgment stays sharp.
Learning path for juniors
Juniors grow in three steps towards judging agent work on their own. See the learning path below.
Tail rotation
Everyone works on verification from time to time, because that is where you learn most about how the system really works.
The learning path for juniors
AI takes over much of the practice work juniors used to learn the trade from. The learning path gives that learning a fixed place, in three steps.
Shadowing
The junior works alongside a senior on Guided and Paired items. The senior steers the agents; at every step the junior explains what the agent did and whether it is right.
Steering under supervision
The junior writes Kite Briefs and steers agents on Free and Guided work. The senior mainly judges the junior's review: what did they spot, and what did they miss?
Checking independently
The junior becomes a reviewer in the Guided zone once explain-back succeeds consistently, their items come back no more often than average, and they find deliberately planted defects in a practice PR.
The Held zone stays with experienced people. Juniors do join those discussions, so they learn those trade-offs too.