Everything with Agency
a pattern for the future of work
I came across this Matt Webb article yesterday, about the future of computing being a choice between cyborgs and rooms: do we augment ourselves (eg, smartwatch) or augment our environments (eg, smart home)?
Matt suggests that baking intelligence into our surroundings is the more interesting of the two, and I think I agree, though I’m less interested in the physical world. While there’s undoubtedly value in asking your roomba where your pets nap when no one’s watching, what secrets are locked inside your digital environment, where AI is already on the frontlines?
I’ve been thinking of this pattern for a while, called Everything an Agent. Recently that’s changed to Everything with Agency, to move the focus to process: the outcome over the subject.
This pattern’s a vehicle for imagining how I might bring the artifacts of work to life - tasks, projects, values, risks, skills - by assigning them an AI agent, a representative.
Imagine:
chatting with a project and learning that a small risk is quietly growing in likelihood
receiving a petition from an underused skill to invest in it, to pair it with an upcoming task (that has its own agent)
And to be clear, by agency, I don’t mean the power to act on the world (not yet at least….) Instead, I think of it as the ability for an object to speak for itself, to represent its own state or needs.
While this may all seem like Future of Work fluff, we can actually hack a version of this together today using only Coda.
3 steps to bring Everything with Agency to life in Coda
Document work in a table: risks, tasks, people, skills, etc.
Create a Compose column that assembles all relevant fields for each item
Create a chat function and feed it with the item summary
That’s one way to bring a digital room to life - to infuse Everything with Agency.
What some are other ways?