Are they? How many people claiming productivity gains are actually being a human in a loop and reviewing and understanding every code change and every line of code ran?

2 years ago I saw it, back before agents were really a thing. But I'm not sure that was an enormous productivity improvement, especially compared to agents today. As for today, everyone I talk to is some level of blindly trusting what the agent is doing or not using agents. I haven't met people in the middle ground and suspect that they are rare enough we don't really know what their productivity gains are.

Human in the loop has become a convenient security-theater-washing for agentic AI.

Outside of coding, I think the issue is even worse because humans will defer so much judgment to AI that the same would apply. Look at how much trouble we've had before modern AI where humans blindly trusted the computer's output rather than make their own judgment, even if their job was to be providing a safeguard against the computer's judgment.