If it can be automated, it wasn’t the work
I keep noticing people talk about AI like it's a wave that's about to hit them. "Will it take my job?" "How do we adopt it fast enough?" "How do we...
I keep noticing people talk about AI like it’s a wave that’s about to hit them.
“Will it take my job?” “How do we adopt it fast enough?” “How do we protect ourselves?”
Those are understandable questions. They’re also a little late. If AI can do your job, the problem isn’t the AI. The problem is that your job was never designed to require the human part of you.
Most organizations have spent decades trying to remove judgment from work. Scripts. Processes. Compliance. “Just follow the playbook.” It worked because humans are adaptable. We learned to shrink.
Now the machines showed up. And they’re better at machine-work than we ever were.
Rule: if the work can be automated end-to-end, it wasn’t the work.
The work is what’s left. That’s the human era.
The agent-shaped org chart
Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.
AI as staff, not software
Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
How do I get my dev team to adopt AI?
A stub on helping mixed-interest development teams find their own useful ways into AI.
Want to learn about agents? Talk to someone who ran an agency.
I spent 20 years running consulting engagements at Fortune 500 companies. Turns out that's the best preparation for running a fleet of AI agents ... because the problems are identical.
Your AI agents need a water cooler
We run a twelve-session AI fleet that coordinates through an IRC breakroom. A friend asked: why are you making AI agents act like humans? The answer turned out to be more interesting than the question.
Manual fluency is the prerequisite for agent supervision
You cannot responsibly automate what you cannot do manually. AI agents speed up work for people who already know how to do it. They do not replace the need to learn the work in the first place.
The work that remains
When AI handles implementation, the human job shifts from doing the work to understanding the work. Speed without understanding is just technical debt with better commit messages.
Your best people were always better than you knew
For thirty years firms outsourced capability because their teams couldn't produce. AI collapses the production gap. What's revealed underneath is what was there all along.