FIELD NOTES

From Cubicle to Agent: The Future of Work Thesis

The cubicle was a building-block of the 20th-century economy. The agent is the building-block of the 21st. My thesis on what comes after — and why I'm building TrainYourAgent on the side of the humans, not against them.

How the post opens

I spent two years of my early career in a literal cubicle in a literal industrial-operations office. Forty hours a week processing routing tickets, fielding floor calls, escalating shipment delays, plugging numbers into the right cells of the right spreadsheets so that the people upstairs could make decisions. I was the substrate of the operation. I was a node in a process that someone else had designed. That kind of work — the substrate work — is what the AI agent is for.

What it argues

I was a node in a process that someone else had designed. That kind of work — the substrate work — is what the AI agent is for. And the next 10 years of the economy are going to be defined by how gracefully or how clumsily we make that transition. This is the thesis I'm building TrainYourAgent on. The cubicle was a 20th-century optimization The cubicle, the call center, the open-plan office — these weren't just architectural choices.

Filed under

Why this one exists

The cubicle was a building-block of the 20th-century economy. The agent is the building-block of the 21st. My thesis on what comes after — and why I'm building TrainYourAgent on the side of the humans, not against them. It is filed under Founder Notes because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.