A harness deliberately de-automated, with the cost stated

Sethi puts a block in every agents file on his personal projects forbidding the assistant to "create, edit, move, rename, or delete project files" or run any state-changing command, requiring it instead to "show me every proposed edit in the chat so I can type it in manually." He then types the code in himself. The stated cost is his own: "Instead of being 10x faster, I'm probably only 2x faster." What he says he buys is a spatial map of the codebase and enough friction to catch hallucinations before they land. He names the pattern he is refusing in one line: "Robots raise PRs, humans review them. It's a brave new world." The scope is narrow and he says so, personal projects only, and he would only "grudgingly" do this for an employer. There is no measurement in the piece; the 2x and 10x are impressions.

Why it matters: The copy-pasteable instruction block provides a concrete counterexample to the lights-out thesis. It is also the second artifact in two days prescribing human re-production as the control for cognitive debt.