Recently, I have been ending productive days with a strange feeling.

I give agents a task. They read the files, research the problem, write, build, test and fix their mistakes.

My role is to direct them, check the output, correct the direction and approve the result.

By evening, a surprising amount of work is finished. Still, I sometimes close the laptop without feeling that I worked.

I am not complaining about agents. They let me create things I could not have made alone.

But the relationship between me and the finished work has changed.

I am Alex, welcome to ShortCu8 by Innov8.

Lets Dive Deep 🐰

Productivity measures how much work was completed.

Fulfilment also depends on what happened to us while completing it.

AI can increase the first without guaranteeing the second.

Before agents, the process stayed with you.

You met the problem, tried something, got stuck, understood one part, changed your approach and eventually finished. The result carried a memory of how you reached it.

Agentic work feels different.

You describe the outcome, leave the task running and return to inspect what happened. Your attention arrives in fragments: a notification, a review, a correction, another run.

This is still work. It needs judgment and responsibility.

But the agent gets the continuous experience of making. You get the review queue.

An experiment with 225 students found that ChatGPT improved creative-writing performance and reduced the effort required. The same participants found the task less enjoyable, less intellectually demanding and less valuable. Read the study.

A larger paper tested AI collaboration across four experiments involving 3,562 people. AI improved immediate performance. When participants moved back to solo work, their intrinsic motivation fell and boredom increased. The researchers also note that these were short online experiments, not years of real workplace behaviour. Read the Scientific Reports paper.

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers about 936 real uses of generative AI. They found that AI changed critical thinking toward verification, integration and supervision. Greater confidence in the AI was associated with less critical-thinking effort. Read the CHI 2025 research.

That resembles agentic work closely. The mental effort remains, but more of it happens through checking someone else's work.

Are these jobs satisfying? apart from the money..

Were we placed on Earth to clean spreadsheets, resize slides, rewrite routine emails and spend an afternoon hunting one coding error?

Much of what occupied our day was never meaningful. It was necessary friction.

Removing it can feel liberating. A recent preregistered experiment with 1,091 participants even found that working with AI instead of a human collaborator increased reported autonomy, competence, interest and job satisfaction. It is a working paper, so the result needs further testing, but it shows that the effect is not universally negative. Read the working paper.

The feeling depends on what AI removes. Taking away repetition can give us room to think. When the agent also takes the learning, authorship and difficult decisions, we can end up watching our own work happen from the outside.

AI can return hours to us.

We could use them for harder questions, original work, learning, relationships or life away from the screen.

Companies could also use the same hours to demand ten presentations instead of one, fifty campaign variations instead of five, and more agents supervised by each worker.

In that version, the boring work disappears but the workload does not. We become quality control for an endless production system.

I am not going to stop using agents.

They are too useful. I can make things today that I could not have made alone.

But completing more work no longer guarantees a satisfying day.

AI can remove parts of the work. It cannot decide what should replace them.

And most of us cannot simply abandon every unfulfilling task. Work still pays for the tools, the bills and the life around it.

So AI may free us from doing some work.

It has not yet freed us from needing to work.

The important question is what happens to the time in between:

Does it become ours?

Or do we simply fill it with more output?

Now go to work and buy some ari 🌾🌾🤗

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