I do like the embrace of The Office as a theme because it so accurately represents the dysfunction of all of the agent swarms I’ve seen: Different personalities pursuing their own little goals that are all competing with each other in subtle ways that eventually leads a funny collapse of the outcome you wanted.

There’s no denying that LLMs are getting better by the month, but the current wave of LLM office and personal assistants reminds me of the old trend where people were hiring personal virtual assistants from foreign countries to manage their work and interface with people. It seemed like an obvious time saver but every time I interacted with someone’s virtual assistant it felt like I was playing a little game of navigating hidden structures and communication barriers to get the message I needed to the person hiding behind it all. Then there were the inevitable scheduling failings, missed meetings, dropped emails, and other things that get blamed on the assistant. I’m getting deja vu watching it all happen again with LLMs replacing virtual assistants and outsourced teams.

Maybe these concepts work for people who are trying to solo dev and who find it interesting to set up and debug little systems for everything they do, but I really don’t like working with anyone who surrounds themselves with one of these multi-agent coordination systems as an external shell. Keep it to the internal work and maybe it’s fun for some people.