YOUR AI AGENT NEEDS A WORKFLOW ENGINE.

The billboard stands by a nondescript stretch of highway somewhere between Redwood City and Mountain View. A boom, likely a bubble, made manifest. A cry of triumphant return. And probably one day, a monument to a bubble bursting. All hype seems destined to furnish tomorrow’s ruin. But for now, this ruin in waiting stands by the side of Highway 101 to inform us that our AI agent needs a workflow engine.

Exactly 101 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a postindustrial wasteland on Long Island, “halfway between West Egg and New York,” with a giant billboard towering over it, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. This stretch of highway may be less desolate than what Fitzgerald described, but the billboards seem just as unsettling and disconsolate as the unnerving, faceless eyes of the fictive Queens optometrist.

Fitzgerald uses those eyes to find something sublime amid capitalist kitsch: the ephemera of consumer culture come to watch over and judge their creators, with the bizarre advertisement standing in for last things: God, fate, judgment, time. I feel judged by “Your AI Agent Needs a Workflow Engine.” First of all, because I had no idea, having left my AI agent lamentably bereft of a workflow engine. Second, because I don’t even have an AI agent. And third, because I have no clue what any of it means. Like Rilke before the torso of Phoebus Apollo, I pass before the monument and get a sense that I am being told to change my life. Unlike Rilke, I have no idea what is wrong or how to go about remedying it.