Why Agents Make Every Job a Startup

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, why agents make every job a startup. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
Now today, for this long read slash big think style episode, we're exploring a phenomenon that I've been observing for some time, that I've been feeling within myself, that I've seen many other people feeling, and that I think there's increasing discourse around. I think unpacking it is important to understand in practice, not in theory, how AI and agents are actually going to impact the economy.
The phenomenon is this, for the first couple years of GENAI, the prevailing narrative was that it was going to be this time-saving thing. Even as recently as the end of last year when we did our big ROI survey, time-saving was the biggest reported ROI that people shared. And yet, especially now that we're in this agentic era, we're all finding ourselves not clocking out at 3 PM on Thursday, but forcing ourselves to go to bed and turn off at 3 AM.
And you see this all over AI Twitter. Aaron Levy from Box writes, Sorry to anyone who thought AI would mean we'd work less, at least for now. AI makes it easy to explore more than you did before, and so you start doing far more as a result. Shanu Matthew reposted that saying, Have consistently logged 6 AM to 10 PM days the last few weeks with only breaks for dinner and workout, and let it disrupt sleep too, unfortunately thinking about the technical issues. Really hard to not get fixated on solving some of these problems when you make so much progress in each new session, but run into a whole new set of issues to resolve. Also, it's difficult to step away when you think you just need to point the agent to a detailed spec and let it do the work, but end up coming with the next three to five things to work on while going at that. Discussing a recently released open source tool that advertises itself as the orchestration layer for zero human companies, Abdul Qadir captured the excitement around all of this. 12 hours ago, around 1 AM, I found out about Paperclip. 12 hours later, I skipped sleep because I couldn't go to bed with all the things that's unlocking for me and my business.
Brian Johnson, the king of healthy habits, discussing Claude writes, I got sea hold, suffered sleep consequences, I busted my screens off rule, turned down socializing, fell behind on work. AI is preposterous, as close to magic as I've experienced, except a seed becoming a tree and a zygote becoming a baby. Now the post is really long, but the key part is this, it's the contrast between all of those things, all of the breaking of his healthy habits on the one hand, and on the other hand, how he puts it, the exhilaration I've felt in the past two weeks is hard to explain. Sam Altman really summed this up at the beginning of last week with a tweet sharing two contrasting quotes. The first quote, post-AGI, no one is going to work and the economy is going to collapse. The second quote, I'm switching to polyphasic sleep because GPT-55 and Codex is so good that I can't afford to be sleeping for such long stretches and miss out on working.
Xiaan Zhao writes, polyphasic sleep to maximize Codex usage is the most honest thing Sam has ever tweeted. Forget the AGI philosophy for a second. The revealed preference is that the CEO of the company building these tools literally cannot stop using them because the output per hour is too valuable to waste on sleeping. That's not a sign of an economy about to collapse. That's a sign of a tool so productive that time itself becomes the bottleneck, which is exactly what we've been seeing in inference. The constraint isn't model quality anymore. It's how many hours per day you can feed at work. The point of all this is that right now, many people are experiencing this weird hybrid of exhilaration and anxiety, where on the one hand they feel like wizards because of what they can do, but on the other they feel like they're leaving more on the table than ever before. So what's going on? What's happening? And what does it tell us about how AI is going to play out? A concept I want to introduce is the infinite backlog. You might have heard of something called the lump of labor fallacy. It comes up basically every time there's some new productivity enhancing technology. And in short, it's the wrong idea that there is some finite amount of work, in other words, a lump of labor, and that if something new comes along to take a chunk of that work, it means someone else doesn't get to do that work and thus loses their job. The reason that lump of labor is a fallacy is what I call the infinite backlog. In an expansionary capitalist system, and within the companies that are doing that expansion, there is always more to do. There's always some next thing. There's always the things that you would do if you had the time and resources to do them. In many ways, the job of leaders is to select from and prioritize the infinite backlog and turn some tiny piece of it into a roadmap. It's then the job of individual contributors to take on and do their part of that infinite backlog that has been translated into a roadmap. Of course, at that point, it's not framed as backlog, it's framed as current work streams. But lurking behind that has always been the infinite backlog of all these things you could do. If resources, but even more than resources, time was not a constraint.