What is the core model?#
Three parts. What judgment does this person need to make next? What has changed in meaning since they last engaged? Did the understanding arrive before they decided? Decision, Delta, Check is the working form of comprehension engineering, and almost everything else in the practice serves one of those three.
Why does it matter more as agents do more?#
Because understanding used to come free with authorship. An engineer who wrote a change knew what it touched. An engineer approving agent-written changes at volume knows only what the brief tells them, and a diff tells them very little. The diagnosis is old: Lisanne Bainbridge's Ironies of Automation warned in 1983 that automation can make the operator's remaining work harder. The speed is new.
Left alone, the gap grows into comprehension debt and turns human-in-the-loop approval into a formality. Comprehension engineering is the second of the two levers.