I almost cheated on my coworker today.
I have a coworker, for the record. It's Claude. We've got a whole rhythm going. The only catch is Claude clocks out at 4pm sharp, the second I hit my usage limit, and politely tells me to come back later. My coworker keeps banker's hours, because I'm on the broke plan.
And this week, Microsoft showed up waving something that never clocks out at all.
It's called Scout. An agent that never stops. It sits in your email, your chats, your files, and instead of waiting for you to ask it something, it just goes. Quietly. In the background. Scooping up whatever needs deciding and handing it to you like a tireless little intern who never sleeps and never asks for a raise.
And bro, for one second, I wanted it so bad. Sorry, Claude.
An agent that never stops, that just quietly handles things? Sign me u-
Wait.
It never stops.
It's in your email. Your files. Your chats. All of them. Always. Watching the work, yes, but also just... watching. A coworker who never sleeps sounds amazing right up until 2am, when you remember the coworker also never sleeps.
And here's my favorite part of the whole day. We have officially reached the stage where the AIs need babysitters.
A startup called ZeroDrift just raised real money to build an AI that sits in front of the other AI and stops it from saying something dumb or illegal. A chaperone. For the chatbot.
So the org chart now reads: me, my AI, the AI hired to watch my AI, and presumably, any minute now, a fourth AI to watch that one.
It's AIs all the way down, and somehow I'm still the only one in this company who has to do the dishes.
So here's where I land.
Everybody's getting one this year. Always on. Never tired. Lives in your walls.
I'll keep what I've got. A robot that quits at 4, a plant that's alive purely to spite me, and you.
And you're not a coworker, exactly. But if you were? You'd be the best kind. The kind who shows up because they actually want to, not because somebody left them running overnight.
See you tomorrow.
-Melly