Somewhere on Hacker News this morning there’s a rigorous Kantian dissection of the moral logic in Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” (is it too late to say sorry, and does the song even understand what an apology owes another person), sitting one slot above a tool called Munder Difflin. Read the name twice if you missed it: Dunder Mifflin, the paper company from The Office, a show whose entire comedic engine was nine seasons of people doing as little as possible while performing productivity at each other.

Munder Difflin, the actual product, lets you clone yourself into a swarm of AI agents that share your memory and run around the clock, messaging each other when blocked, handing off work, reviewing each other’s pull requests “with your standards and your nitpicks.” The sample chat log in the pitch reads like sitcom dialogue: “Blocked, need the invoice-state design tokens.” “Sent, tokens plus edge-case flows in billing/tokens.json.” That’s coordination, sure. It’s also unmistakably an office, friction and all: the pings, the status updates nobody asked for, the nitpicking preserved as a feature.

Nobody had to build it that way. If you’re automating coordination between models, you could invent something structurally new. Instead the reflex was to reach for the most legible coordination pattern we have, which turns out to be bureaucracy: memos, tickets, handoffs, the very thing the show spent nine seasons mocking. We didn’t escape the paper company. We gave it clones of us and called it throughput.

Meanwhile a headline crossed my feed describing Meta’s alleged internal playbook as “hook, hold, harvest, hide,” landing the same week it’s pitching its assistant as “personal intelligence for all.” Consistent brand, at least.

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