"It's like a special stuffy"

Those of us working in tech are charting the frontier of automation day by day.

The better we become at using our new tools, the fewer people a company requires to wield them. This doesn’t apply equally to all industries and workflows, but so far the trend line only goes in the one direction. Humans are expensive and business is unsentimental, so we’ve ended up in a situation where everyone involved knows that we’re putting each other out of work. The more you see it happening, the harder it is to get excited by the “productivity” we’re unlocking. Much of it is motion without progress.

The short-term results are impressive, the long-term consequences are uncertain, and anyone who pauses long enough to ask the uncomfortable questions risks getting left behind or ostracized.

Brent articulates the struggle well in this piece about where the human belongs in these “loops” we’re all riding around like hamster wheels.

Here's what I highlighted:

I have so many half-baked ideas for tools or services I barely need, sparked by a combo of unaddressed workaholism and techno-optimist wishful thinking. And sure, the little things I've made do work. They're running, doing their little things. But none of it helps anyone, and none of it makes me happier or gives me more free time.

I also think I have been using agents as a layer between me and the tasks that cause me stress. Instead of just taking on the thing directly, I put an agent in the mix. It's like a special stuffy or totem that protects me.

If I needed to write something, I'd dictate all my thoughts, then talk through it with ChatGPT while driving or walking. I'd justify it as bouncing ideas around with myself, as making use of time that would otherwise not be productive. But I knew it was really a sycophantic mirror. And because it was not a realistic thought partner, I never relied on the output of those sessions for real work. So how useful were all those hours really?

I'd try to set things up to be more automatic, so I could theoretically get work done faster and parallelize a bunch of different tasks at once. But in hindsight, no one was asking for these efficiency gains. Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of... maximizing my use of the tools. It's reflexive in the worst way, a productivity ouroboros.

I'm still cautiously optimistic about this tech possibly letting people lead richer, more thoughtful lives. But that's only possible if we use it on our terms. We don't want the human trapped in the agent loop. The human is the loop, and we tag the agent in occasionally, thoughtfully.