The Supervisory Review Queue

The Supervisory Review Queue demonstrates that delegating tasks to autonomous AI agents does not eliminate workloads, but shifts human labor into an air traffic control supervisory review queue. While agents deliver immense leverage on bounded, mechanically verifiable tasks (CI monitoring, DOM accessibility audits, syntax validation), they fail silently with perfect syntax during complex architectural refactors and struggle with physical reality collisions and interpersonal nuance. Auditing someone else's plausible, slightly flawed work line-by-line is often more mentally exhausting than performing the task manually. Unbounded agent delegation replaces to-do lists with review debt queues. Real leverage requires four operational laws: start with read-only triggers, enforce narrow definitions of done, require human approval on external actions, and treat all output as junior drafts.