The New Agentic O-Ring World: AI Agents Push Founders to Round-the-Clock Work
Key Takeaways
- •Founders say AI agents often need human guidance or added context, which makes them feel compelled to monitor work at all hours.
- •One founder said he can no longer keep a regular sleep schedule because letting agents sit blocked for eight hours is too costly.
- •A founder in San Mateo estimated his six-person company is operating about 30 times faster with agents than without them.
- •The faster pace created by agents also increases human workload, including more customer requests after onboarding accelerates.
- •The article links this work pattern to economic ideas about productivity, including Keynes’s prediction of shorter hours and Kremer’s O-ring theory of weak links.
AI agents are giving new intensity to the startup grind.
Because agents often require guidance or additional context as they move through their tasks, Sharma, 27, finds himself wanting to be available to them around the clock and forgoing a regular sleep schedule as a result. Until recently, he could not monitor them remotely through a phone or smartwatch.
“The cost of the agents’ being blocked for eight hours is way too high,” he says. “They can be done with their work at any point of time, in the middle of the night.”
Founders have long put in punishing hours in the name of building the next big thing. But the growing capabilities of AI agents—and the speed at which the models powering them are evolving—give new meaning to working yourself to the bone.
“They just demand your attention,” he says. “Does it need anything? Can I help it in any way?”
Pezaris, who lives in San Mateo, Calif., typically works from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. He estimates Proxon, which employs six human developers, is operating 30 times faster than it would without agents. But agent work begets human work: onboarding customers at a faster clip means needing to respond to more customer requests, for example.
There is also an agent FOMO multiplier effect. “Every minute that I’m not working, I’m missing out on not doing a week’s worth of work,” says Pezaris.
The excerpts are drawn from a report by Katherine Bindley at The Wall Street Journal.
In commentary accompanying the excerpts on Marginal Revolution—the economics blog co-authored by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok—the author writes: “As I have been joking in some of my talks, we need to start taking bets on when the AI leisure dividend will arrive. It will, but not just yet…” The quip echoes one of economics’ oldest debates over technology and work: in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes predicted that compounding productivity gains would leave future generations working roughly 15 hours a week. Whether agent-driven speedups eventually show up as shorter hours rather than longer ones is the open question behind the joke.
The headline’s “O-ring” phrasing invokes economist Michael Kremer’s O-ring theory of production—the idea that a production process is only as strong as its weakest link. Kremer laid out the model in a 1993 paper, naming it for the small rubber seal whose failure brought down the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986; in his formulation, output depends multiplicatively on the quality of every task in a process, so one weak link caps the value of all the rest. Applied to an agent-heavy startup, that logic puts the spotlight on the human link: if agents idle whenever their owner is asleep, founder availability becomes the seal on the whole operation. Kremer later shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his experimental work on alleviating global poverty.
