Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds

Summary

The post frames AI as a new “miracle material” that could reshape knowledge work as steel and semiconductors reshaped earlier eras. It argues that coding agents already let one programmer orchestrate several AI coding agents, but broader knowledge work remains constrained by fragmented context across tools and weak verifiability. At the organisational level, it compares AI with steel and steam, suggesting agents could preserve workflow context, surface decisions, and reduce dependence on meetings and hierarchical approvals; Notion is described as using more than 700 agents alongside 1,000 employees for repetitive tasks. At economy scale, it predicts organisations spanning humans and thousands of agents, with continuous workflows and new rhythms, while acknowledging that this transition may be disorienting and requires redesign rather than simply adding chatbots to existing tools.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Coding agents benefit from concentrated context in the IDE, repository, and terminal, plus code’s testable results; general knowledge work lacks both properties.

2. 2

   Notion is described as using more than 700 agents alongside 1,000 employees for meeting notes, knowledge synthesis, IT requests, customer feedback, onboarding, and status reports.

3. 3

   The proposed shift is from human-scale organisations paced by meetings and email toward workflows spanning humans and thousands of agents that operate continuously across time zones.