ivan.turkovic in the article The Middle Loop: Where Engineering Actually Lives Now (published April 27, 2026):

The mental tax of operating in an environment where companies measure AI output as if coding was ever the bottleneck. It wasn’t. Meetings were. Coordination was. Unclear specs were.

The middle loop is the other side of that coin.

Agents took over one part of the job. The part that felt like engineering to a lot of developers. Now those developers either move up into supervision or get squeezed out. The constraint shifts from production capacity to decision-making capacity.