The Interface Is Downstream: Designing the Terms of Human-Agent Collaboration

Abstract

Before an agent responds or acts, much of the experience has already been designed. Memory and retrieval shape what it notices. Evidence rules shape what it may claim. Permissions shape what it can do. Learning rules shape what it carries into the next encounter. The argument comes from Alicia, a personal agent I've built and used since January 2026. A fine-tuning pilot produced no defensible model-performance result. It exposed a provenance failure: Alicia repeated an interpretation from a retrieved synthesis, cited a source note credited by that synthesis, and left the synthesis out of the visible chain. In a model-blind review of thirty-three citations, one reviewer judged that the retrieved intermediary supplied the claim in sixteen relayed citations and part of it in four. Five of twelve citations to directly retrieved targets lacked support in the target excerpt supplied for review. These judgments remain unadjudicated, and the packet is not public. I call the shared setting a humorphic environment: a persistent computational setting that translates a human practice into software. The first Humorphism paper translated partnership. This paper translates the studio, the room where practice happens. The failure prompted an audit of attention, evidence, action, and learning, with a review artifact and available recourse for each. The test is whether the person can inspect and contest what shaped the teammate's behavior. The output is downstream. Correction, consent, and learning carry the collaborative interface back upstream.