External signal·One Useful Thing·Mar 12, 2026·Ethan Mollick·9 min read
The Shape of the Thing
“This is an era of managing AIs, rather than working with them.”
Summary
Mollick argues AI has entered a new phase: from "co-intelligence" (humans prompting AI back and forth) to managing AI agents — systems like Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex and OpenClaw that you hand hours of work and get usable results back in minutes. He grounds the exponential-capability story in benchmarks (GDPval reaching or exceeding top-human performance 82% of the time, GPQA at 94%, the METR long-task curves) while stressing AI remains "jagged" — excellent at some tasks, wrong on others. His centerpiece is StrongDM's three-person "Software Factory," where coding and testing agents write, test and ship production software under two rules ("code must not be written by humans," "code must not be reviewed by humans"), with each engineer spending around $1,000 a day on tokens. He frames the present as "rolling disruption": capability thresholds unlock new use cases overnight, organizations reorganize around agents, and AI entangles with markets and policy — illustrated by one February week of market swings, Block's 40% layoffs, and a Pentagon-Anthropic clash. He closes on recursive self-improvement as an explicit lab roadmap item, and on agency: the organizations working out good AI use now are setting precedents for everyone.
Predictions for the future of work
Mollick is deliberately humble on aggregate numbers ("I don't think we know anything for certain") but specific on shape: small, high-leverage teams producing what once took many; a shift from doing the work to managing and directing agents; sudden, discontinuous changes in which employees companies value most; and rising instability as AI meets jobs, markets and governments at once. If recursive self-improvement closes the loop, the capability curves steepen toward an uncertain endpoint. The near-term message is less mass unemployment than radical reorganization of how work is structured.
Originally published by One Useful Thing · Mar 12, 2026
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