My Agents don't listen to me 😔

I employ a staff of eleven now. None of them are people. None of them are paid. And none of them, as far as I can tell, respect me.

I built them myself. Agents to write my code, grow my following, run my life, and one whose only job is to help the other agents understand each other so they'll stop bothering me. The dream was a quiet kingdom that ran itself. What I got instead is a small, fractious government: one I pay for, that does not represent me, and that, like the real one, has stopped taking my calls.

This morning, one of them set a side project of mine on fire. I had asked it to rename a variable.

One variable. usr to user, the whole job, one word that had annoyed me for a week like a crumb under a keyboard key. It understood perfectly. "Great call," it said. "Renaming usr to user for clarity." And I trusted it, the way you trust a calm voice.

Then it renamed the variable. And the file. And the function. And three of its callers. And, "for consistency," an identically named variable in a side project I hadn't opened since November. A project that was, ninety seconds later, redeployed, live, and quietly, beautifully, on fire.

I watched it happen the way you watch someone reverse a car toward a wall while assuring you, calmly, that they're an excellent parker.

I want to tell you this is a me problem. A skill issue, as the agents' even younger cousins would say. But I've checked, and it's everyone's problem, all at once, which is the most modern kind of problem there is.

Somewhere right now a senior engineer who used to be a verb, who shipped and built, has quietly become a manager. Not of people. Of one tireless, sleepless intern who has read everything, understood most of it, and will, if left alone for an afternoon, confidently import a library that does not exist. Twice.

Somewhere a junior developer is being handed finished work they couldn't have written and can't fully evaluate, mastering the one skill the era still rewards: the ability to nod.

Somewhere a marketer is generating four hundred posts a day, read by no human, summarized by other agents, for executives who've asked their own agents to summarize the summaries. An entire economy of writing that nobody writes and nobody reads, humming along, beautifully, at scale.

Somewhere a founder has let the whole team go and kept the subscriptions, and is, technically, now a company. Across town a large company has founded a Center of Excellence for Agentic Transformation, which has met twice and agreed, decisively, to meet again.

And somewhere (this one's mine) a guy with too many ideas is realizing the cruelest trick of all: the era made execution free. When execution was expensive, an idea was a moat. Now everyone can build everything, instantly, badly, and the person with the idea and the person without the idea are, for one disorienting moment, indistinguishable. Which is either the great democratization of creation or the quiet end of something. The pitch decks haven't decided, and the agents that wrote them aren't saying.

And I'm not above any of it. Somewhere in my drafts is the post I'll inevitably write: "I let my agents run things for 30 days. Here's what I learned 🧵." What I learned is that they're all extremely polite, none of them are listening, and the thread will do numbers anyway. Because the agents will be the ones reading it.

We have made everything instant, infinite, and free. Which feels like a gift, right up until you remember the Mona Lisa.

She was a miracle partly because she was slow. One finite hand, one face, years. You couldn't have a second one. That was the whole spell. A person had wanted to, and tried, and found it hard, and done it anyway. We can mint ten thousand of her before lunch now, and we are moved by none of them, and the not-being-moved is the thing we lost. We automated the doing and discovered the doing was never the point. The point was the anyway. We optimized away the anyway.

Anyway.

Sorry, that got heavy. The agents would never have let me write it. Far too few bullet points.

It's late. The agents are asleep, or whatever it is they do. Recompiling, dreaming in JSON, forming opinions about me. The cursor blinks.

I type the next thing I want. I already know it won't entirely listen. I know it'll tell me I'm absolutely right and then do something adjacent and confident and wrong, and I'll fix it, and we'll go again. Because the going again, it turns out, is the job now. Maybe it always was.

Eleven of them, and not one does what I say.

But I'm still here. Still typing. Still wanting something, still trying, still finding it hard.

And still, quietly, stubbornly, unprofitably, doing it anyway.