We read 100 agent sessions to find out what the human actually contributes
· 9 min read
We read 100 agent sessions to find out what the human actually contributes | Agentic PrinciplesA transcript study of 1,567 human turns in coding-agent sessions, separating the turns that carried information from the turns that only carried permission.Agentic Principlesfield-noteagentic-principlesfield-noteevaluatorresearcherunderstand-safe-agentic-codingresearch
The median instruction given to a coding agent in our sample is eleven words long and sets off eight tool calls. That ratio is the whole economics of agentic work in one line: a very small amount of human input steering a very large amount of machine work.
So we went looking for the obvious follow-up question. Of those eleven words — how many mattered?