the task isn't the job

Sunil Pai, a developer, argues that the rise of coding agents has exposed a fundamental confusion between completing tasks and fulfilling the 'job to be done,' citing Clay Christensen's framework. He notes that while agents enable rapid prototyping and implementation, they do not shorten roadmaps or improve decision-making about what is worth building. Pai emphasizes that autonomy is a capability, not a product direction, and that the desired relationship with AI depends on the user's underlying job, whether they want the agent to act independently, collaborate, or simply disappear.

the task isn't the job a new role, and some questions I want to build my way through coding agents have given me the stupidest problem: I can now build three wrong things before lunch. lines of code are a terrible measure of productivity etc etc, but they’re still a signal of what’s going on: tens of thousands of lines in a week, ideas tried in an afternoon that would’ve previously needed a few days of commitment, tests and docs and all the annoying little bits I would’ve solemnly promised to come back to later. this is dope, genuinely I like making things and now I can make more things. buuuut my roadmap is’nt ten times shorter. and I’m definitely not ten times better at deciding what is worth building. teams haven’t started casually shipping a year of product work every month. you can look around and and it’s hard to say what software has gotten meaningfully better in the last year. mostly tho, I seem to reach the difficult decisions faster https://x.com/threepointone/status/2064616516478243222 . all the implementation that used to sit between these decisions has been squashed, so I can ask an agent to try three approaches and have all of them sitting in front of me before I’ve decided if the problem was worth solving. are we mixing up the task with the job? there’s a framework from clay christensen called “jobs to be done” https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/ . tl;dr: people don’t buy a product because they woke up wanting a product. they “hire” it to make some kind of progress in their life. almost nobody wakes up with the job “use an ai agent.” they want to figure out whether they can afford a house, make the thing they can see in their head, or organise a holiday with six friends without accidentally becoming the project manager of a small temporary company. the software/tool is an implementation detail usually temporary . and the relationship with the machine changes depending on the Job To Be Done. say I need thirty seconds of background music for a presentation. a machine that disappears for twenty seconds and returns with something usable has done a perfect job; I did not want to become a musician here. but if I sit down because I want to make music , handing me the finished song is a fairly spectacular misunderstanding. I wanted to move the chords around, hear what happened, make it worse, change my mind, stumble onto the thing I didn’t know I was looking for. the process wasn’t “friction” on the way to the result. I really needed to tap into my first breakup and access the pain of adolescence for this chord structure, y’know? same artifact, completely different job. I wrote recently https://sunilpai.dev/posts/one-document-two-hands/ about wanting the human and the agent to have their hands in the same “goo”, both able to reach into the thing being made. I still like that idea but that could’ve turned it into a Grand Unified Theory of AI Interfaces, which it absolutely is not. there are many things where I emphatically do NOT want my hands in the goo. please argue with the insurance company for me, chase the refund, reschedule the meeting across six calendars, fill out the form, and do not invite me into a Delightful Collaborative Experience with the God Computer. the 12$ word “agency” sometimes means being involved, but it also means being able to make the whole fucking thing go away. we tend to describe progress in agents as progress in autonomy: first they could do five minutes of work, then an hour, now we talk seriously about agents running for days. that’s impressive, but autonomy is a capability, not a product direction the Job To Be Done tells you whether to use it. sometimes I want “do this for me,” sometimes “do this with me” or “show me how.” sometimes I just need enough of a boost to do something I couldn’t do before. or the AI could quietly become a feature so I don’t have to learn a new ritual involving prompts at all. a cybernetic machine can nail the task and completely miss the job. coding makes this very very easy to see because the tasks are so legible and verifiable : write the function, migrate the API, fix the tests. models are extraordinarily good at this stuff and will get better still. but a software team’s job was never “produce implementations.” the job includes noticing that users keep asking for the wrong thing because they don’t have the vocabulary for the right one. it includes deciding that two individually sensible features make the product worse together. it includes choosing between several perfectly defensible directions, getting other people to come with you, shipping one, and living with it. as an aside, this is why I’m still pro “product manager” as a role, once you’ve worked with a great one, it’s clear how much absurd value they can bring to a team maybe models get extremely good at all of that too; this is not a sneaky argument for some sacred category of Human Work™ that a machine can never touch. I’m just noticing that when one kind of work becomes cheap, you finally get a good look at the work hiding behind it. if I may take a moment to make this personal: cheap internet, open source software and free material for learning javascript changed my life. growing up in a small town in south india, I could learn without enrolling somewhere, make things without much money, put them on the internet, and eventually have people on the other side of the world care about them. I have a very strong emotional attachment to technology doing that. there was, however, a fairly large entrance exam. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of my life getting good at computers; it took obsession, time, luck, moving countries and cities, and a bunch of choices that gave work far more room in my life than many people could or should give it. programming gave me enormous leverage, but first I had to become a programmer. so… what if the entrance exam could be smaller? not just “make programmers vastly better programmers”, but let many more people borrow the leverage of programming without reorganising their lives around becoming smelly programmers first. I’ve been trying to write down what I actually want to spend my working life doing. this sort of exercise makes me want to crawl out of my own skin, but the phrase I landed on was turn intelligence into a ladder . not bad. also suspicious of how much it sounds like something printed on a cloud provider’s tote bag. another version of this is that making intelligence cheap does not automatically make “agency” cheap. people are constrained by time, money, confidence, health, education, institutions, family, geography; a model does not magic any of that away. there’s a perfectly believable future where these tools mostly compound the advantage of people who already have the skill, taste, money and the spare time to use them well. “give everybody intelligence” is therefore not the only Big Problem to solve. we seem to be making decent progress there already. I’m more interested in whether intelligence can lower the prerequisites for agency ? this is where Jobs To Be Done feels relevant. don’t start with “where can we put an agent?” start with the thing somebody is already trying to do. which parts are tedious? where are they blocked on expertise they don’t have? which parts are the actual reason they wanted to do it? what should disappear? what becomes possible? sometimes more capability with less understanding is an excellent trade. sometimes saving no time at all is also a win, because the person finally made something that used to exist only in their head. there isn’t going to be one clean “agency” number that tells us whether we got it right. these are the questions I want to spend more time on: what happens after execution gets cheap and plentiful? when do people want participation and when do they just want relief? which parts of expertise can disappear without leaving people helpless? how do we help people make new things, not just produce more of the things we already know how to ask for? and if this is meant to help people who aren’t already technologists, answering all of that by talking exclusively to AI researchers and software engineers would be very funny. conveniently, I’ve just moved into a new role at work: builder in residence. part of the job is spending much more time outside the company walls - building in public, working with people at other companies/orgs, finding the bits that don’t work yet, bringing back what I learn. there are people and companies I admire enough that I’ve spent the last year wondering if I should go work with them. maybe now I’ll get to work with some of them anyway? wink wink nudge nudge I also want to get just a bit further away from the centre of the technology industry. artists, teachers, musicians, parents, small businesses; people who are extremely good at jobs that do not involve staring at a terminal all day, and have no interest whatsoever in “agents” I’m not going out to discover the future and report back; christ, that would be ridiculous. I have some questions, a few instincts, and some ideas I like enough to test - hopefully not enough to keep loving them when reality disagrees. mostly I want to build things with people and see which ideas survive. powerful creative leverage changed my life, and I’d like more people to get some version of it without having to live the life I did to get there. I don’t know what we need to build for that yet. seems like a good thing to go find out.