The Work Shaped Object and AI Agents, General LLMs

2026 has brought a great reflection into how we actually work and what constitutes work. Users are struggling with these concepts. Diving into these ideas should give us some idea for the future.

The Work Shaped Object

For just a moment, imagine you're back in school. At some point in your education you most likely had some sort of Professional Writing course or similar. While I haven't been in school for a while, I am pretty confident in the answers I get from other people that the following Work Shaped Object is drilled into students' heads.

It goes something like this:

A professionally written email looks like this:

Dear Sir or Madam,
It's good talking to you again. I heard you went on vacation recently and cannot wait to hear more. Until then, do you have an update on our project?

Respectfully,
[Your Name]
[Phone Number]
[Email Address]

This is quite a fine Work Shaped Object. It is polite and exactly what everyone expects.

But if you ask anyone who sends email more than a few dozen times a week, this is inefficient and bizarre. There's not really any particular reason to address it to an audience, adding your name makes no sense, and putting your email address in an email is even weirder.

It's not a question of if you personally write emails this way, and I hope 99.999% of people immediately threw this concept away, but you were most certainly taught some combination of these things as an appropriate work task. Everyone else was also taught this exact same thing and to this day I receive emails from aging politicians in that exact same format.

Regardless of how hard we tried, people refused to recognize these obsolete and often just plain weird mannerisms of the professional were pretty unnecessary. Even if you convinced workers they were unnecessary there was often a lag with convincing customers these rituals were unnecessary.

Customers see a value in an awkward "sweet spot" of "enough work."

As a fun aside, you can look up the sweet spot for book publishing. It's generally 200-300 printed pages. Less than that and the book is just too short while longer than that causes customers to avoid the title for being too long. Ultimately you could argue the same story could be any number of pages as long as the story is told.

You can take this same base concept and extrapolate it to other work. Email itself is an abstraction of handwriting, PRs aren't much more than convenient letters to teammates, and every calendar app looks like a physical desktop copy.

We aren't even going to discuss the weird rituals of posting your git contribution graph where we have no idea if 99% of those commits are the same text file or a rewrite of Doom for a toaster.

These are all Work Shaped Objects that are often extremely verbose, Rube Goldberg-ish, obsolete, and frustrating processes that simply do not need to exist.

How AI Agents Fit Into This

A typical AI agent can be demonstrated to write quick emails, coordinate calendars from sources like raw text, or even maintain your git contribution graph without you.

AI agents are extremely good at not only making an email into the Work Shaped Object you were taught in school but they are also extremely good at turning that Work Shaped Object into a 5 bullet point list.

Hours spent researching the best most optimized Big O for a chunk of code and running it through agents (possibly overnight) result in roughly the same results.

For a real world analogy, imagine someone that is working at a small store. The boss wants work to be done. If there is no work, they demand the worker sweep the floor. It's 2026 and we have Roombas. If the floor isn't dirty and the robot can do a fine job, there isn't any reason to force a human to do things that are completely unnecessary simply to repeat the lived traumas of their boss.

A robot vacuum cleaner could bonk into a shelf and knock down an expensive glass bottle. Realistically a worker could just as easily cause this same event. In either case, even more is the result of the incident.

How It Seems to Affect People

There are a few camps here.

Some users do not care about writing that professional writing email from back when they were in school and welcome the day they can make an intelligent and thorough response by just screaming at Gemini or similar.

Another camp is people that are very angry and confused as to why the thing they did with pride is now delegated to something barely better than "overblown autocomplete." There is a twinge of imposter syndrome happening with users becoming depressed that they don't have to, for example, bonsai garden their markdown anymore.

There is a special group of people that believe that a robot vacuum cleaner is a precursor to the inevitable and immediate creation of a robot that builds skyscrapers flawlessly. This could immediately curb the housing crisis. This is, unfortunately, very much fantasy as of August 25th, the year of our AI, 2026 CE.

Others are able to use these agents to overcome disabilities, whether those are physical, learning, or mental, to provide equivalent Work Shaped Objects while exerting the same effort as their coworkers without those same disabilities.

You can argue who is right, what is ethical, and how this impacts all of us, but the truth is the Work Shaped Object is often unnecessary with the new tools we all have access to. This isn't to say it can't be done, but there is a question on if you prefer driving screws by hand or with an electric drill. One of those things is most likely a waste of your time, can cause you repetative stress injury, and exudes effort with not much overall quality difference.

This blog post itself is a Work Shaped Object involving research, writing, and picking an image to make it look like every other blog post. None of this uses AI and you can probably find plenty of typoes. There's a personal satisfaction to that and here we are.

If there was a more efficient way to transmit an idea, rather than work around an idea, surely I would opt to do that instead.

The Promise That Never Gets Fulfilled

If all of the above sounds pretty good, I do have some bad news.

I am pretty confident that since work became an referencable thing, humans have promised to make less work through innovation. The atlatl throws things farther and AI can make a whole lot of blog posts that it spams to every social media site to generate an audience.

The promise is that we will all have an equitable opportunity to do different work that is not a waste of our time.

That's never how it ends up.

Automated cashiers at department store have been a thing for years. Instead of telling the employees that they can read books, study, complete college courses, or even just beat a video game or two, workers are still required to zombie walk around sweeping already cleaned floors and straightening products on shelves.

The workers should be quite angry about this.

Instead they are sold the idea that they must work to keep working so that they can work to complete work and that idea pervades twitter.

It's not a question of why someone should be expected to do something of value but rather a question of why most "work" is a pile of Work Shaped Objects with little-to-no value.

The most obvious answer is to meet hours. Those hours make those positions attractive to workers. Even when fewer workers are required because of automation the hourly wage never increases. Most employees in the US never get the opportunity to do more (such as training, furthering their education, or even just catching up on their favorite show) than zombie walk around as an asset of the company.

If you overachieve you are simply assigned even more work.

Even Out of Work, There is Work To Do

Consumer hositility invents these same tasks.

Let's take a quick walk through the idea of booking a hotel. It used to be that you simply walked in and requested a room. Someone logged it in a ledger. This is far before my time, but I've heard stories. The output here had some pretty obvious fields that most likely included payments, client's name, and room number.

IBM created a Point-of-Sale system back in the 70s. Again, before my time, but this made the insertion of payments, client's name, and room number even more uniform into an electronic database.

If you fast forward to today, you can't really walk into any hotel and get a room. Usually they sell out all of their rooms at a reduced rate to anther company. That company sells the same rooms at a discount. Adhoc purchase of a hotel room really messes this up.

If you use one of these sites to book a hotel room there is a whole period you will spend dismissing rewards programs, upsells, pool access, and extra towels.

What should be a few fields in a database is now an entire interactive experience.

We are sold that AI agents will "Just Book A Room" - but that will never happen. This is another promise that will go unfulfilled. The idea that an automated system is purchasing every upsell will make customers quite angry while losing these upsells will make the hotel quite angry.

It is complete gullability to think an AI agent will ever save you time booking a hotel room in the future.

We have already had the technology for an Excel macro to be able to book a room through API. No AI was ever needed.

On a fun aside, there was a terraform provider for Domino's Pizza. You could order pizza right from the console without any AI.

Conclusion

While I am certainly interested in having work being done in an automated way, including work that can make things more useful for people (think gestures, text-to-speech, or translation to enable readers to consume more material they want), the likelihood of this being anything but more than the broken promises we've highlighted is pretty high.

This is not "dooming AI" but rather a call to users to recognize the inevitability of what will happen if you are simply only here for the ride.

A while ago we were promised agents to handle spam calling and that didn't seem to materialize. Agents were promised to go literally call someone to book appointments, and while I believe Google did eventually make good on this, there still remains a question as to why I need to call someone at all.

Today, right now, even on commodity hardware you have the ability to produce Work Shaped Objects that fuel most industries with little to no effort. This is not an advertisement to make Fruit Love Island - rather, it is a suggestion to go find out if you can use a frontier model or service to go complete a small business application, a request for a loan, or to talk to an Xfinity rep because your cable has been out for a week. Fire it off at your HOA that's enforcing rules that don't exist.

At minimum, point these things at the classic Work Shaped Object Unable To Justify Its Existence also known as your local politician. The individuals are often supported by incompetent automated systems created by their friends to justify paying their friends to include their friends in more Work Shaped Objects all on donations.

The same sentiment is shared for the C-levels at your organization who have assistants to write emails like the first example.

Most of these types of projects have fallen to the wayside for people to continuously rewrite things in rust (another Work Shaped Object of limited value, no shade to rust which is a great language).

If you know someone that only uses Photoshop to crop photos and you have a penchant for rewriting things in rust it might be time to create something in rust that crops photos.

Instead of saying "AI can write my email - what do I do now?" it's probably time to question what the next opportunity for work that benefits you could be.