A minor release from OpenAI, as described in a blog post published on Monday, will be at least visually familiar to people who have used project management software at work.
The GitHub page for OpenAI’s open-source release, called Symphony, says this piece of software “turns project work into isolated, autonomous implementation runs, allowing teams to manage work instead of supervising coding agents.” The blog post says Symphony “turns a project-management board like Linear into a control plane for coding agents. Every open task gets an agent, agents run continuously, and humans review the results.”
Linear is one popular example of a piece of software that uses Kanban-style signboards to track work progress. If you are a manager, you might love watching projects get added by your team, and then seeing tasks and sub-tasks get completed. If you’re not a manager, but you’ve used this kind of software, maybe it’s become the digital version of what we once used to call a “to-do list,” and you might find it less fun.
Symphony, seen in a video embedded on the OpenAI blog, is similar, except in the idealized version shown in the video, the sub-tasks all get checked off in seconds. There aren’t workers doing these tasks and then laboriously returning to the management application to check in about their progress—it’s software all the way down.
A Microsoft blog post last year by Jared Spataro, leader of a Microsoft project called “AI at Work,” is interesting in this context. Spataro wrote:
As agents increasingly join the workforce, we’ll see the rise of the agent boss: someone who builds, delegates to and manages agents to amplify their impact and take control of their career in the age of AI. From the boardroom to the frontline, every worker will need to think like the CEO of an agent-powered startup.
Elsewhere, people have talked about this in a much more nervous tone. It sometimes seems as if AI fans envision a world where everyone is a middle manager. Your task will be to tell the AI what to do. You feel like you no longer “do” anything, but you’re more stressed out than ever.
It’s worth looking closely at Symphony. Whether you believe this story about the AI future or not, Symphony is at least a vivid illustration of what work life could be like when your role is just high-speed delegation of whatever used to be your tasks.
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