Making Work Is Good After All

You're sitting in front of this super advanced AI chatbot. You know it can do graduate-level physics and vibecode entire apps. You see the cursor blinking, and you type: "summarize this PDF."

This seems wrong.

So you look around, and you read about "prompt engineering". Maybe you're giving it bad instructions. You clarify what you want from a summary, what format and length to use. And what you get is...a better summary of the PDF?

The problem isn't the way you're wording the prompt, it's what you're asking it to do. You want it to do work, and so you try to think of tasks you have and hand them off. That makes sense, and it isn't wrong, but it isn't right either.

Let's picture a story. An eager new AI intern shows up and asks "what should I do?" You tell them to read the PDF, give you the highlights, maybe make a little presentation, get back to you. Great! Now ten interns show up. You start handing off a few more things for them to do — check the citations, draft the email. Then a hundred, then a thousand. They're all asking for work, but nothing is actually getting done.

It's not the interns' fault. They can do the work. It's not that you have nothing to do. The problem is that the work you need isn't in a shape you can hand to them.

The fix is that somebody has to, for lack of a better phrase, make work. That sounds bad. It conjures images of pointless busy work created by shortsighted bosses. But there's another way to look at it: Your boss, if they're doing their job right, is helping you. They are creating the tasks that justify your job - you need to be employed so that those tasks can get done. This feels weird. Progress means checking things off your to-do list, right? But for you to do that, someone had to first fill up your to-do list with items, ideally useful, meaningful, important items.

Now let's go back to the AI interns. They're standing around waiting for someone to tell them what to do, and you now realize that you're it. You start by trying to take your existing work and break it into pieces they can do. That's a good start. But there's no way you can keep a hundred interns busy with just the work you currently do. Even if you did, then what would be left for you to do?

You go up to ask your manager what to do. They must know what they're doing, right? But in the hallway outside their office, there's an even bigger line of interns waiting for tasks. Nothing is getting done!

Your boss sees you and calls you in. "This intern situation is madness! I can't tell everyone what to do one at a time. I need your help. Here is the big vision of the project we want to do. Can you translate that down into smaller, intern-sized tasks and check that their answers make sense?" You're a bit nervous - figuring out how to make work instead of doing tasks isn't what you're used to - but it's clear that this is what everyone needs from you. At least you don't have to be a real manager and deal with HR...

And now we're back to that blinking cursor in the AI chat. What goes in this prompt? What's worth asking for? Your boss handed you the big vision and asked you to break it down. The cursor is waiting for you to do the same thing.