> All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided!

I mostly agree with you other than this one sentence.

Let's say you're building the literal antithesis of Gastown: an AI agent software specifically designed to be human reviewed and monitored. How to you make this as efficient as possible? Well, it's by ensuring high quality results from human oversight and control while spending the least amount of time. Which to be precise, is still reducing human oversight and control per unit of useful work done.

It's really about granularity - when I'm building something there are parts of the system where I want very fine-grained control and oversight over what is built and how, and there are others where... it just doesn't really matter. What matters to who is contextual - a software architect tends to care about different things from a product manager for example. This is the idea of gradual specification - I should be able to defer some decisions to the AI and exercise full control over other aspects, but it's the humans that should be able to choose what level they want to work at.