Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:
Long-running, smart, and self-correcting AI systems do not need constant human intervention, and they require a different way of working (this is also the subject of my upcoming book, Co-Existence, which you might want to pre-order here). And, as opposed to chatbots, agents come with extra machinery: harnesses that give the AI access to tools and an environment to act in, and apps built for agents like Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex. As a result, the already increasing ability of AI models can be improved still further by a good harness or app.
So work is increasingly about assigning work to agents, rather than working together with chatbots. A joint study by OpenAI and academic economists shows how quickly this is happening inside their own organization. Critically, it isn’t just coders who are using agents. Legal, HR, and other non-tech functions have adopted agents at nearly the same rate. OpenAI may be a sort of canary in the coal mine for what will happen elsewhere in work.
More here.
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