Loss of Agency Is a Scaling Failure in Modern Software Systems (traulmen.blogspot.com)

As systems scale, control increasingly shifts from users to opaque layers: policy engines, algorithms, and now LLM-based agents. This isn’t an anti-AI argument, but an engineering one: collapsing policy, logic, and execution creates systems that are harder to reason about, override, or trust. This post examines loss of agency as a recurring failure mode in modern software architectures.

I’m not arguing against scale or automation. I’m arguing that many modern systems optimize for throughput and engagement while quietly removing inspectability, reversibility, and human interruptibility. Curious how others here think about “agency” as a system requirement, not a UX concern.