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A minor release from OpenAI, as described in a blog post published on Monday, will be at least visually familiar to people who have used project management software at work.<\/p>\n
The GitHub page for OpenAI\u2019s open-source release, called Symphony, says this piece of software \u201cturns project work into isolated, autonomous implementation runs, allowing teams to manage work instead of supervising coding agents.\u201d The blog post says Symphony \u201cturns a project-management board like Linear into a control plane for coding agents. Every open task gets an agent, agents run continuously, and humans review the results.\u201d<\/p>\n
Linear is one popular example of a piece of software that uses Kanban-style signboards to track work progress. If you are a manager, you might love watching projects get added by your team, and then seeing tasks and sub-tasks get completed. If you\u2019re not a manager, but you\u2019ve used this kind of software, maybe it\u2019s become the digital version of what we once used to call a \u201cto-do list,\u201d and you might find it less fun.<\/p>\n
Symphony, seen in a video embedded on the OpenAI blog, is similar, except in the idealized version shown in the video, the sub-tasks all get checked off in seconds. There aren\u2019t workers doing these tasks and then laboriously returning to the management application to check in about their progress\u2014it\u2019s software all the way down.<\/p>\n
A Microsoft blog post last year by Jared Spataro, leader of a Microsoft project called \u201cAI at Work,\u201d is interesting in this context. Spataro wrote:<\/p>\n
\nAs agents increasingly join the workforce, we\u2019ll see the rise of the\u00a0agent boss:<\/strong>\u00a0someone who builds, delegates to and manages agents to amplify their impact and take control of their career in the age of AI. From the boardroom to the frontline, every worker will need to think like the CEO of an agent-powered startup.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Elsewhere, people have talked about this in a much more nervous tone. It sometimes seems as if AI fans envision a world where everyone is a middle manager. Your task will be to tell the AI what to do. You feel like you no longer \u201cdo\u201d anything, but you\u2019re more stressed out than ever.<\/p>\n