We talk a lot about models, APIs, agents, reliability and architecture. But none of them exist in a bubble. There’s a human building the system, and another human eventually living with whatever it does.

I want to talk about what gets lost between those two people. The cognitive load on developers trying to keep up with technology that changes underneath them. The assumptions we make about the people at the other end. And what happens when technically impressive systems meet messy, emotional, unpredictable humans in the real world.

Because ultimately, we aren’t building for benchmarks. We’re building for people.

Bring your war stories. Especially the ones where the technology worked exactly as designed — and the human absolutely did not.