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title: 'Understanding is the new bottleneck — Geoffrey Litt, Notion'
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  Autonomous loops are hot, but the reality is that most agentic tasks still
  require human judgement. And to guide your agents well, it's not enough to
  just verify correctness -- you actually need to understand the work they're
  doing. In this talk, I'll share some techniques for staying in the loop and
  efficiently developing understanding, combining old ideas from education and
  cognitive science with modern agent capabilities. You'll walk away with some
  practical tips for moving faster with agents by understanding more, not less.
  --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and
  resources on this talk's official AIE page:
  https://ai.engineer/talks/WkBPX-oDMnA-understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck Join
  our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): -
  AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and
  engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference
  returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS
  2026 in Sydney ---
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updated: '2026-10-24T08:10:18.267Z'
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# Understanding is the new bottleneck — Geoffrey Litt, Notion

Autonomous loops are hot, but the reality is that most agentic tasks still require human judgement. And to guide your agents well, it's not enough to just verify correctness -- you actually need to understand the work they're doing. In this talk, I'll share some techniques for staying in the loop and efficiently developing understanding, combining old ideas from education and cognitive science with modern agent capabilities. You'll walk away with some practical tips for moving faster with agents by understanding more, not less. --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/WkBPX-oDMnA-understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney ---

Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck-geoffrey-litt-n-d30259bc5ec5 · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md)

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