-
Human Work Is Mostly Bullshit. Agents Eat it for Breakfast?
What most office work actually is (and why 80% of agent builders target the wrong market)
Human work today is mostly bullshit. Nobody knows what office workers actually do Most people can't articulate their own job in concrete steps. There is no magic. No deep craft.
20% of people build things. 80% of people coordinate the movement of information so the 20% can build. Most office jobs are just Just low-level information logistics and break down to 5 primitive actions: Move data from A to B > Ask for something and wait > Compare two things > Summarize > Get permission.
AI Agents eat logistics for breakfast. And yet most agent builders choose building agents for the 20% layer and fail - because those domains are specialized, regulated, and high-stakes. The gold is in the 80%. The logistics layer. Boring but huge. Millions of people doing mind-numbing work they desperately want automated.
Agent builder love selling magical solution - but companies buy process automation with clear ROI, not "agentic job replacement" — that sounds scary and gets legal pushback. The gold is in friction, not efficiency. Efficiency is a spreadsheet win. Friction is a human win.
When you automate a process, people don't just do it faster. They change what they do entirely. You're not selling efficiency. You're selling role evolution. Companies won't admit that. They'll say "we want 30% faster invoice processing." What they actually get: that person now has time to negotiate better vendor terms.
You're bored by office automation because office work is boring. It keeps the lights on. The "different economy" isn't coming. So: build for the 20% (noble, hard, most fail) or build for the 80% (boring, huge, prints money). Most pick the first and go nowhere. The ones who pick the second make $50k/month selling reconciliation to mid-sized manufacturers.
And so the entire economy is bullshit jobs. You categorically cannot automate them — even with AGI. But it will still happen.
-
"Imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights." - Manifeste du Surréalisme (André Breton, 1924)
-
4-17 cells active battery balancer - Common type of balancer dissipates excess energy as heat through resistors
