The purpose of fun at work

In art, science and business, creativity is the engine that drives progress

Recently our team has been spending a bunch of time working on a side project at work. 5 minutes an hour or so has been focused on interactions with an AI agent that exclusively exists for delight and fun.

Every prompt we give to an agent through cursor activates a hook that chooses a voice from The Path's Cursor Theatrics project. That voice then comments on the work we're doing and says something appropriate for the character. At first glance, this feels like a waste of time. AI talking to us in a voice, commenting on work we should be focusing on, and distracting from the work seems like detriment all around.

Here's the hook:

Because of this work, everyone on our team has interacted with a non-standard, non corporate LLM. We have experienced the value of prompt tuning, of content refinement, and of content injection. We get dozens of interactions a day with this system and each time, we get a little practice working with LLMs a little better.

If we had to build something like this in production, it would be extremely expensive. We'd risk upsetting customers, we'd risk things breaking. It would be wasteful to produce a product nobody wants. The interesting thing is what's happening when we add play to work. Our systems get better, our iterations get cheaper, and solutions to real problems become more accessible.

A strategy of seeking and creating surprising situations, is optimal for learning in that it maximizes the speed at which learning takes place, and enables optimized learning strategies, even where opportunities to learn are scarce.

Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play

We might be able to build slightly more work without the voices project, but there are a lot of nuances about how to build something well, when to build it, and whether it's worth it led to more difficult questions.

I do not personally feel obligated to put in extra hours at work. We have a decent work culture, and I have a family and obligations at home. If I work in the evenings, something has to be sacrificed. It does not feel right to sacrifice time with my children, time with my wife, cooking, buying groceries, etc. This means that the most valuable sacrifice that I can give is that of my leisure time. The moment that work feels like work is the moment that I want to set it down. Instead, if work feels like play, it becomes an option that competes directly with Instagram or video games.

Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Mark Twain

The counterpoint of that is: make something fun your job, and you'll find yourself wanting to work all the time.

The 2010s were an interesting place for software engineers, as companies were figuring this out. Huge amounts of money and effort were invested in keeping engineers at work and having them focus on work as much as possible. Time in the office meant time thinking about the job meant better outcomes. Spending 15 minutes figuring out where to go to lunch, and spending one hour going to lunch, and then spending 15 minutes digesting is much worse than having catered lunch brought into the office and eating it while talking about work.

Similarly, finding people who were capable of doing good work was difficult, and so retaining engineering capability became a major facet of corporate culture. As more and more software engineers joined the industry, the need to retain software engineering talent dropped significantly. The incorporation of AI into the system has made the pool of talent even more homogenous.

The opportunity to completely remove fun from the job has become more possible than ever. Overhiring is a common practice. Block, Meta, Alphabet, and more laid off huge swaths of engineers, knowing that if they need them, they can always hire new ones. Each engineer becomes a cog in a machine.

The reverse is also true. Each job that a software engineer can participate in has become flat and gray as well. If it does not matter who works the job, then it does not matter what job you work. This means that all of the definition of what makes jobs valuable comes in the spaces between the work.

Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way

Unknown, but probably an 80's sitcom

It's a meme, and yet everyone says their favorite thing about working at any company is the people you work with. The one predictor of high-performing teams is psychological safety. I'd be willing to bet that most people find the working portion to be important, but the human, fun portion to be mandatory for an incredible place to work.