Human-Agent Relationship
How the human-AI working relationship changes over time.
This is the most human category in the taxonomy — and arguably the most important. AI systems don't just produce output; they reshape the relationship between humans and their work. These terms name what happens to people as they increasingly delegate to agents: the skills they lose, the trust they misplace, the anxiety they develop, and — when the relationship works — the new capabilities they gain.
Human-Code Divergence
The gap created between a user and their codebase when an agent mediates all development.
Cognitive Load
The mental burden placed on the human when working with AI systems.
Agency Erosion
Gradual loss of human decision-making authority as agents take over more workflow without checkpoints.
Skill Atrophy
Decay of human technical skills from prolonged delegation to agents.
Automation Dependency
Reliance on agents to the point where the human can't perform the task without them.
Trust Without Verification
Accepting agent output without review — a precondition for Execution Hallucination going undetected.
Confidence Decay
The gradual erosion of user trust as a system repeatedly loses context, hallucinates, or fails to follow through.
Capability Illusion
The user believes the AI can do more than it actually can, leading to over-delegation and undetected failures.
Learned Helplessness
The user stops attempting tasks they could do because the agent is "supposed to handle it."
Ownership Erosion
The gradual loss of creative or intellectual ownership over work the agent produced.
Pace Anxiety
The stress of feeling outpaced by your own tools.
Anthropomorphic Trust
Trusting an agent because it *feels* competent rather than because its output is verified.
Informed Delegation
Intentional handoff of work to an agent with clear scope, checkpoints, and the ability to inspect and override.
Agent Transparency
The user can see what the agent did, why, and what it changed — at any time.
Collaborative Autonomy
A working relationship where the agent operates independently within boundaries the human sets and can adjust.
Calibrated Trust
The user accurately understands what the agent can and can't do, and delegates accordingly.
Skill Evolution
The human develops new higher-order skills as the agent handles lower-order execution.
Maintained Competence
The user stays technically capable of doing the work themselves even while delegating.
Creative Ownership
The user remains the author — the agent assists but the human drives vision, taste, and final judgment.