Agentics: the modern company won't have bullshit jobs

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Agentics: the modern company won't have bullshit jobs<br>The modern company won’t have bullshit jobs. The upside case for AI is that this is a freeing and joyful thing.

theahura<br>Jun 25, 2026

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If you or your team is trying to figure out how to use AI at your company take a look at Nori Sessions! Here’s a primer targeted towards security people. And here’s one targeted towards eng teams. And another for the ops folks. Nori Sessions is simply the best way to leverage AI tools, because we made it 😁 On average, Nori makes teams 2-5x more productive across sales, ops, and eng. Shoot me a message at amol@noriagentic.com if you are interested!

The year is 2022. I am the CTO of my first company. I am managing a team of brilliant engineers and a team of brilliant and completely non-technical sales and marketing folks. I spend, to a first approximation, half my life counting geese.<br>I am constantly in meetings. Every meeting has some complicated name, like ‘Aligning strategy for Q1’. But I know that the meeting is really about counting geese. We look at dashboards that make sure that everyone has their geese properly counted. Sometimes the engineers will mention that there were geese that they counted that aren’t reflected on the bean counter. Other times, the marketing and sales folks will say that some geese that we thought had been counted hadn’t been counted enough. There is much argument about the true number of geese.<br>Once we reach consensus, we spend time making sure that the goose count on GitHub matches the goose count on Linear which matches the goose count in Google Drive. There are more geese, the flow of geese is constant, so we have to spend an increasing amount of time counting them. We plan years around geese. I try to protect my team from the geese. Mostly that means that I am spending more of my time counting geese.<br>This is at a 14 person startup. It was worse when I was at the big tech co.<br>The year is 2026. I’m CEO of my second company. I haven’t thought about geese once in the last 6 months. The AI counts the geese now.<br>12 Grams of Carbon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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There are a lot of things to be worried about with AI. Things that I’ve written about extensively in other parts of this blog. But the thing that I am most excited about is the complete and total elimination of bullshit overhead. The future of work may be complex and crazy. But you know what it won’t involve? Having a founder staying up late at night making sure the linear story points are aligned with the things merged into GitHub so that the eng team sync meeting can save fifteen minutes of everyone’s time.

Everything that people hate, they hate because those tasks are boring and routine and dull and mindless. How many teams love to hate their CRM? Every time I get off the high of a fantastic customer pitch, I have 0 desire to then go into Hubspot or Salesforce to mark some row in a table ‘Lead’. How many hours get lost to making slide decks the right branding? Raise your hand if you lost an hour trying to figure out how to move an image that is in the background of your slide because it’s set as a ‘company wide template’, which was a feature you only just learned about ten minutes ago. How much information gets buried in slack, or docs, or linear, or wherever you do your work? Hours and hours of productive time wasted counting geese.<br>AI tools excel at this kind of data munging. They are so good at taking in data from calendly and piping it into salesforce or pulling in sentry data to debug something in github or whatever. Every company has a “brain.” Normally that brain is decentralized. It exists across the ten million different tools we all use to track state. Jira, confluence, notion, GitHub, linear, Asana, Monday, trello, docs, drive, slack, teams, one drive, Dropbox, one note, Salesforce, intercom, otter, fireflies, snowflake, databricks, datadog otel AWS gcloud Coca-Cola double decker bus his name was my name too.<br>The promise of AI is that you never need to think about any of that again. A universal AI operating system, a single entry point to the entire company brain. That doesn’t mean replacing people, though some folks may see it that way. To me it means taking the bullshit out of bullshit jobs.<br>I don’t think everyone is going to get there all at once, but the shape of the future is very clear to me.<br>There are humans and there are agents.

The humans spend time making decisions that matter — north star vision, strategy, marketing, and actually talking to people.

The agents live in the background, in the ether, ephemeral, automatically bringing the vision to life with minimal friction.

This is a new and transformative way of conceptualizing work. AI is a new and transformative technology.<br>But it’s also very much within...