The task isn't the job

The gist

• Sunil Pai writes on 14 August 2026 that coding agents have given him "the stupidest problem: I can now build three wrong things before lunch," with tens of thousands of lines shipped in a week but no ten times shorter roadmap.
• He applies Clay Christensen's "jobs to be done" framework, noting almost nobody wakes up with the job "use an ai agent" and that the tool is usually a temporary implementation detail.
• He contrasts needing thirty seconds of background music for a presentation, where a machine returning a finished clip is perfect, with wanting to make music, where handing over the finished song misses the point entirely.
• He argues autonomy is "a capability, not a product direction," and that agency sometimes means being involved and sometimes means "being able to make the whole fucking thing go away."
• Pai revisits his earlier idea of human and agent having hands in the same "goo" but says it is not a Grand Unified Theory of AI Interfaces, citing insurance calls, refunds and forms he wants handled without collaboration.
• Growing up in a small town in south India, he credits cheap internet and open source with changing his life, and now asks whether the entrance exam to programming leverage can be made smaller, summarising his aim as "turn intelligence into a ladder".

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