No One Scheduled This

AI is making human collaboration optional.

For the first time in my career, I can imagine doing my work entirely alone.

Years ago, something important in our production data went wrong. A colleague and I spent hours repairing it with Bash one-liners — awk piped into xargs through sed, tweaked over and over, the data triple-checked in vi before anything was allowed to run for real. Dry-run, inspect, adjust, dry-run again. There were faster and cruder ways to fix it. That was partly the point. We were figuring out what the tool could do, and discovering how the other person thought under pressure.

I remember the technical pleasure of it. More than that, I remember realizing: this is someone I want beside me when something difficult happens.

Today most of that night could collapse into a prompt and a few checks. That is progress; I would use it. But the hours it removes were not empty. Relationships were forming inside some of them.

For my whole working life, what we were building was bigger than any one of us. Shared work became shared stakes, then shared history. Other people changed what was possible. We watched one another struggle and improve. We bumped into each other without intending to. Eventually a project stopped belonging entirely to any one of us. Work kept putting strangers beside us long enough for some of them to stop being strangers.

Our ambitions used to require other people. Increasingly, they may not. Remote work removed the room. AI can remove the colleague.

Dependence was not inherently good. It also meant bad teams, bad managers and people we would never have chosen. Some of that dependence is worth losing.

But when technology removes an old constraint, look carefully at what disappears with it. Some of what slowed the work down was pointless. Some of it kept us together long enough for something unplanned to happen. No one scheduled “14:00–16:00 — become the kind of people who would trust each other with something important five years from now.” We may remove the very conditions that gave trust time to grow.

Two things used to arrive bundled:
instrumental collaboration — I need you to accomplish the task.
human co-presence — I need someone else to be there while a part of my life happens.
The first smuggled in the second.

Human connection used to come bundled with the work. Increasingly, it may not. What we stand to lose is not company — company is easy to find. The loss is: being entangled.

I am realizing that some needs only become visible once the structure carrying them disappears. Work supplied the reason to be together; I never had to separate the reason from the value of it.

I no longer need another person beside me to do the work. And almost immediately, I found myself choosing one anyway. A friend and I share a table now — different companies, different problems. No manager put us there. And the old byproducts have already begun arriving uninvited: he complained that he was tired of trying to picture the feature a pull request described, and I said, just add a mockup viewer to your review tool — approximate it visually. Ten minutes later it existed. No one could have scheduled that either.

I cannot decide in advance who will matter to me. I can choose not to eliminate every chance for it to happen. The arrangement can disappear. What became possible between people does not have to disappear with it.

I choose the version of my life in which you are there anyway.

The danger is confusing optional with unnecessary.