By Barry Buck, with Claude Opus 4.8 – Every second video on my feed this month is someone whose life is now run by the agent of the week. It reads their email, books their travel, ships their code and, presumably, walks their dog.
Meanwhile, here is my actual evening, and the evening of every developer I know who uses AI seriously: upload it, download it, unzip it, prompt it, build it, check it, paste it, rename it. Daft Punk wrote the job description in 2005.
The work itself is now astonishingly fast. Everything orbiting the work is still done by hand, at 22:00, by me.
That distance, between what the keynote promises and what the keyboard delivers, is the subject of my talk at AI Expo next month. This column is the confession behind it.
Two weeks ago, waiting on builds across two laptops, I asked my AI colleague a silly question: if you could be reincarnated anime-style, what would you choose? I said one of my own cats. Warm laptop, no responsibilities, keep the love of techno, memories optional.
The answer that came back was the guild receptionist. Not the sword (a mind carried into someone else’s adventure that never holds the hilt; “that’s not reincarnation, that’s Tuesday”). Not the vending machine. The one who never enters the dungeon, keeps the ledger, hands down the quests, and remembers who came back with what.
Anyone can say “welcome back”. The receptionist is the only one who noticed you were gone.
So we built the Guild: a quest board, a ledger where every decision carries a default and a date, ranks that automation earns in the open. The receptionist takes the paperwork. The guild master decides.
Here is the honest part. I was never the guild master. I was the guy who kicked the dungeon door in and soloed every boss himself, for a decade, because waiting for the party cost more than doing it. I am currently watching an anime about a receptionist who secretly solos the bosses so she can clock out on time. I have never felt so seen by a cartoon, and it is not a compliment.
The Guild’s real feature isn’t automation. It’s trust as a number: a quest type starts at rank F, gets promoted by clean runs, demoted by one correction, all of it visible. “I don’t trust it” becomes “it has run this twenty-three times and I corrected it once.”
Two weeks in, I’m still not using it properly. That is the truth nobody on the feed says out loud: handing your orbit to an AI is a trust problem wearing a tooling costume, and it takes longer than a short. If my team and I, who build this stuff for a bank, are nowhere near the advertised state, I doubt the state is as widespread as the algorithm suggests.
Which brings me to Sandton, 28 and 29 October, stand S27. The Gap Between the Keynote and the Keyboard: AI in Business, Unfiltered. Production numbers, failed experiments, the architecture that survived.
Come and disagree with me in person. The receptionist will have your quest ready.