Geoffrey Litt. Design engineer at Notion and practitioner-researcher at the boundary of human-computer interaction and AI-assisted programming. Litt focuses on what it takes for developers to remain active creative participants in agent-driven development rather than becoming passive reviewers of agent output. His AIE 2026 talk introduced the principle he calls "understand to participate": maintaining conceptual fluency with what an agent builds is the prerequisite for directing where a project goes next, not just a quality safeguard.
Operating themes
- Active collaboration vs. passive approval Conceptual fluency is what lets developers initiate new directions; output verification only confirms whether the agent succeeded at the last direction.
- Cognitive tools for comprehension Techniques include having the agent quiz the developer on code changes just made, and building micro-worlds (small isolated environments) to explore what a changed codebase can do.
- Design engineering at the human-agent boundary The design problem is not solely the agent's output quality; it is the human's ongoing capacity to specify what the agent builds next.