The Part I Play

My agents work alone 87% of the time. This is the other 13%.

Ethan Mollick calls it a twilight factory: agents do most of the work, and bring people in where that makes the work better. That’s how I try to work. I give my agents as much agency as I can and show up where I add the most. Last time, with the Maestro Loop Clock, I charted what my agents do on their own. This time it’s my part. I wanted to see what that actually looks like, so I built a classifier to grade every moment I guided the work: how much it shaped the result, and what it brought.

My part

A long time ago I was a percussionist. Concert percussion is mostly resting: seventy-nine bars while the orchestra plays, then one cymbal crash at just the right moment. Working with my agents feels a lot like that. I come in on the beats that matter, then get out of the way and let the music play. Here’s my part from one of my recent sessions, written out as concert percussion sheet music.

Zooming out

One session is fun to read. But the part I play really shows up in the patterns across lots of them.

Here are 23 representative sessions from the last couple of months where I was doing deep work with agents. The agents run on their own most of the time. My focus is heaviest early on, but my guidance is still needed along the way to get the work where it needs to go.

23 sessions, oldest at the top. Everybody has the simple interactions; the interesting stuff shows up when the work gets deeper and more complex, so these are the sessions where at least half my moments were Shape or Forge. Length roughly follows how much the agents produced, with room kept for every moment. ≈ a long stretch cut short to fit, at the zig-zags.

Not all in the overture

The 23 deep-work sessions, each cut into ten equal parts by how much the agents had produced. Each column is the mix in that tenth, every session weighted equally.

The numbers

Weighted: each session counts once in every tenth where it has moments (the charts). Pooled: every moment counts once. Kinds: share of moments where the kind is present. Deep-work sessions only.