Simon Willison · 2026-07-12 · notable
Simon Willison — an LLM agent should never be the DRI for a project
Simon Willison argues that Directly Responsible Individuals — the Apple-born role for the single person accountable for a project — must stay human. Because agents cannot be held accountable, they cannot be the DRI, only tools the DRI uses.
The 1979 IBM slide is back: a computer can never be held accountable, so it must never be your DRI.
What is it?
Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) is a concept from Apple, later adopted at GitLab and others, that puts one named person on the hook for the success or failure of a specific project. Simon Willison writes that an LLM-powered agent should never occupy that slot. Accountability is a human property, and agents can only assist the person carrying it.
How does it work?
Willison anchors the argument on a 1979 IBM training slide that read 'A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.' A DRI decides the trade-offs and takes the blame when a project ships broken; an agent can draft the plan, run the build, or write the code, but there is no one to fire when it hallucinates a deadline.
Why does it matter?
As agent-run projects become normal, the DRI question sets a clean line: humans stay named on every decision that has real-world consequences, and every agent output routes through a person who owns it. That guardrail protects both the org (someone to answer for outages, ethics, security) and the individual (agents cannot dodge accountability by pointing at their model).
Who is it for?
Engineering managers, agent builders, tech leads staffing AI-augmented teams.
Try it
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/12/directly-responsible-individuals/