A multitude of green rental bikes. — Photo by Viktor Keri on Unsplash

Published 16 February 2026

e543 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on Agentic AI and the changing nature of work, agents renting humans, real time translation, artistic roads, e-bikes for your feet and a whole lot more.

Andy, Michael and Michael get things rolling with several AI articles. First up, is a Mastodon post by Alan Pringle that called attention to a HBR article on the influence of AI on productivity. This then led to a post on productivity acceleration technologies from years past – from COBOL, which was designed to enable business people to write programs, to 4GLs to case tools.

Then, the team discusses a detailed post from Matt Shumer entitled Something Big Is Happening. The entire post is well worth reading, not only for how history is unfolding in real time, also for the recommendations that Matt makes for people to take onboard right now. Among the recommendations are to begin the habit of adapting, and experimenting with multiple tools to build resiliency and experience.

Wrapping up this section is a new version of taskrabbit that provides an API for Agents to rent humans for specific work called rentahuman.ai . The future is certainly coming in fast.

In the AR VR section, there is a story from Tom’s Guide where the author used her Ray Ban Meta glasses to translate the Super Bowl halftime video in real time. This feels like the precursor to the next logical step, a dynamic version of the Amazon X-Ray feature where further context can be personalized and served up to the user if they wish.

After touching on the assembly of Game Poems and the art of roads in games, the team sprints to the end of the episode with Nike’s Project Amplify, which is an ankle exoskeleton to augment humans running abilities. Looping back to the start of the episode, Andy highlights a BBC show featuring Chris McCausland.

What’s been your experience with AI productivity? What are you experimenting with? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know!

Selected Links

AI

"For instance, #engineers, in turn, spent more time reviewing, correcting, and guiding #AI-generated or AI-assisted work produced by colleagues. These demands extended beyond formal #code review. Engineers increasingly found themselves coaching colleagues who were 'vibe-coding' and finishing partially complete pull requests."

https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it

— Alan Pringle (@alanpringle@mstdn.social)
2026-02-10T13:47:23.853Z