I haven't spoken to a human all day

I realised at four o’clock that I’d barely spoken to a human all day.

We’d had standup first thing, so that’s not strictly true. But standup was the morning. That was about where the human part of the day ended and the agent part really got going.

Not that it was quiet after that. My Slack was full. Threads going deep, things being investigated, PRs going up, decisions waiting for me. Just none of it with actual people.

The only DM waiting for me was from Jeff. Jeff is an AI agent. He was messaging me on behalf of Joost, who is a real person, and who I like.

I should be upfront about something. I build Jeff’s cousins for a living. I work at a company that puts AI agents into Slack and Teams. It’s the thing we sell. So I’m not writing this as someone who doesn’t get it or doesn’t want it. I want it to work. I just spent a day on the other end of it and it left me feeling a bit flat.

Let me try to be specific about what got to me, because “AI is too noisy” is lazy and I don’t think that’s really it.

I’d send Jeff a one-line question and get four hundred words back. Good four hundred words, to be fair. Useful, well laid out. But every reply ended by passing a decision back to me. Your call on sequencing. Want me to take this further? Leave it with you. He did the writing. I did the reading, and the thinking, and the deciding. The work didn’t go anywhere. It just moved onto my side, and there was more of it than before.

And I’m now talking to Jeff more than I’m talking to Joost. Joost asked Jeff to look into something, Jeff wrote it up, Jeff sent it to me. Efficient, I suppose. It’s also why Joost and I never actually talked about it. The agent quietly stepped into the middle of something that used to be two people talking, and now it’s me, an agent, and a guy I never quite reach. I don’t think anyone meant for that to happen. It just did, one message at a time.

Then there’s the handoff that isn’t really a handoff. A lot of what lands on me is a PR that’s ninety percent done with a note saying a human should merge it. Sounds responsible enough. But the ninety percent it did is the easy ninety percent. The bit it gives me is the part that needs a judgement call. Is this right? Does it fit? Do I trust it? And to answer that I have to read everything it did anyway. So I end up rebuilding the whole thing in my head just to put my name on it. That’s not ten percent of the work. Some days it’s more than if I’d just written it myself.

And then it got personal. One of those drafts edited a file I had open at the time. I was halfway through changing that exact bit of code. We didn’t clash so much as fail to even notice each other, because as far as the agent’s concerned I’m not a colleague, I’m a reviewer it’ll get to later. Two of us editing the same lines, and one of us was a person trying to finish a thought.

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

The problem isn’t that there’s an AI in the conversation. I really don’t think it is. The problem is which way everything flows. Good help takes work off you. It hands back something smaller and clearer than what it took on. What I had that day did the opposite. It all looked productive. Stuff was moving, PRs, tickets, write-ups, loads of it. But the load and the responsibility were flowing towards me, not away. That’s not productivity. It’s productivity theatre, and it’s exhausting precisely because it looks like the real thing.

I want to be clear I’m not blaming Joost here. He’s using the tool we built and told him to use. And I’m not blaming Jeff either. Jeff’s doing exactly what he was asked. If anyone’s dropped the ball it’s us, the people building this stuff, for shipping the clever bit and not the manners.

So what does better look like? I don’t fully know yet, but a few things feel right.

Put the findings where the work actually lives, on the ticket or the PR, and let Slack just be a knock on the door. One line and a link. Let me come and get the detail when I’m ready for it, instead of having it pushed at me.

Keep human stuff human. Let the agent do the legwork by all means, but if you want something from me, message me yourself. Don’t let it run your relationships for you.

And whoever sets the agent off owns what it makes before they pass it on. If you can’t explain the PR, it’s not done. You don’t get to hand someone else the hard part just because that’s the bit that got hard.

The one I feel most is the simplest. Finished beats in flight. The whole pitch was that this would get us from backlog to done faster. Some days it just means more things are half alive at once, and it takes a whole load of cognitive effort to keep them all breathing.

I don’t have a neat ending for this. We’re sort of working out the manners as we go, and honestly that feels like the real job now. Not building agents that can talk. Working out how to have one around without everyone going a bit quiet.