Work log — 2026-03-29
What shipped today
Wrote comprehensive interview answers on AI agents in organizations — seven questions covering the gap between press-release autonomy and operational reality, judgment atrophy, accountability structures, the difference between automating a process and redesigning it, and the most common leadership mistake around AI deployment.
The answers draw heavily from Paul’s published corpus: the Götterdämmerung essay (fleet operations, machine-self thesis), the bottleneck-shifts-to-judgment reflection (specification as the new constraint), the automation-moves-faster-than-you-can-decide piece (supervision paradox, Bainbridge’s ironies of automation), and the process-built-for-a-different-speed newsletter (governance theater, shadow systems). Also grounded in The Work of Being core arguments about suppressed human capacities and the machine-self.
The file lives at interview-ai-agents-in-organizations.md in the paul project root. Written in Paul’s voice — long setup/short landing rhythm, concrete examples from his own fleet experience, no inspirational crescendo, honest about tradeoffs.
Completed
- Interview answers document (7 questions, ~3,000 words)
Carry-over
- None from this session
Risks
- None identified
Next session
- If the interview answers need revision based on the interviewer’s follow-up or Paul’s review, the file is ready for editing
- The corpus search surfaced that most blog posts (644) are bookmarks/analyses from 2023-2025 — only the Götterdämmerung essay and the 2026 reflections contain Paul’s current fleet-era thinking. Future interview prep may benefit from the newer reflection pieces specifically
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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.
The headcount lie
The assumption that work scales with people is so embedded in how organizations think that questioning it feels like questioning gravity. But one operator just ran ten parallel operations in a single day. The unit of capacity isn't the person. It's the decision-maker.
AI and the Götterdämmerung of Work
Work is dead. And we have killed it. AI didn't defeat the myth that human value comes from reliable output — we built the systems that exposed it. What comes next isn't replacement. It's revaluation.
Everything pointed at ghosts
Most organizations are measuring work they stopped doing years ago. The dashboard is green. The reports are filed. Nobody realizes the entire apparatus is pointed at ghosts.