Money Makes The Agents Go Around

While reading thought my emails this morning in a futile attempt to get them under control briefly, I saw a mention of creating agentic harnesses in a design workflow. 

That sentence will mean something to some of you, but to me it’s just exhausting. For those that don’t, it loosely translates to managing the guidelines for separate AI agents that perform tasks for you and the thought that jobs now are starting to become prompt and harness competence is multiple levels of depressing.


I don’t think it’ll truly ever replace the human side of these professions in its entirety but because of our predisposition deep in capitalism, this way of working will become very prevalent and companies pursue their mission to cut costs while maintaining a shell of their existing product.


I’m not anti AI. I’m a developer, I use it daily to complete repetitive work. But the more that I use it, the more that I feel my thinking and understanding get worse. The temptation to ship code that AI did because it looks okay, seems to work and passes all the tests (the AI wrote the tests too) is increasingly tempting. And more so as we’re required to produce increased output for the same input because investors need to be making more and more money.


But some aspects of work, and this morning that is focused on reading about designers - designers whose purpose is to communicate messages from human to human - are now using agentic workflows to generate more and more content makes me feel hollow inside.


To some degree I actually think usability and use experience is to blame because there are now fixed ways to do things and the more fixed something is the easier it is to get AI to replicate and variate on that fix.


There is too much focus on making money, owning things and being efficient. The things that are designed are now also being consumed by AI and people are basically just being hooked up to attention drugs while algorithms to all the thinking for them.


I didn’t mean for this to be a rant post, but here we are.

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