#43
Every few months, I ask ChatGPT to track AI progress against the predictions made in Situational Awareness and AI2027.
So far, I think both have been pretty good.
I recently asked what we should expect by this time next year.
Here is the relevant idea from Situational Awareness:
Around 2027, Leopold expects something like the “drop-in remote worker”: onboarded like a human hire, using Slack and other software, making PRs, and independently working on large projects for weeks at a time.
And from AI2027:
By July 2027, OpenBrain publicly claims AGI and releases Agent-3-mini, a “cheap remote worker” that is better than the typical OpenBrain employee, 10x cheaper than the internal Agent-3, and useful across remote work.
Both centre on the same idea: a remote worker that you can chat with in Slack, or whatever you use internally, and then have it do the kinds of things that another person would do from their computer.
We’ve already seen early signs of what this could look like, including with OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude computer use, and more recently, Claude Tag.
My bet is that by next summer, this will be good enough to act like an extremely diligent junior development manager. That’s a pretty big deal.
Take one part of a development manager’s job, managing a Zoning By-law Amendment (ZBA) application in Toronto.
A simplified version of the workflow looks something like this:
Engage an architect and planner.
Work with them to prepare a high-level schematic proposal, including a concept site plan and concept elevations.
Request a Pre-Application Consultation meeting through the City’s Application Submission Tool.
Upload the required materials in the correct format and naming convention.
Receive the City’s confirmation number, respond to any completeness issues with the PAC request, and then receive payment instructions.
Pay the PAC fee.
Receive proposed PAC meeting times, coordinate calendars, and invite the architect, planner, and someone from our team.
Attend the PAC meeting.
Take detailed notes on what City Planning, Urban Design, Transportation, Engineering, Forestry, Parks, and others are asking for.
Receive the Planning Application Checklist Package after the PAC, including the City’s comments and the studies, reports, plans, and drawings required for a complete application.
Turn that checklist into a project plan.
Build a list of 2-3 consultants for each required study.
Email each consultant with the right scope, the drawings, the PAC comments, and the expected timeline.
Collect proposals.
Compare scope, cost, timing, exclusions, and risks.
Recommend a consultant team for human approval.
Send contracts or proposals to a human for signature.
Schedule a kick-off call with the consultant team.
Attend the kick-off call, take notes, circulate action items, and set timeline expectations.
Track drawings, reports, comments, and consultant deliverables in Drive and Sheets.
Review materials as they arrive against the City’s Terms of Reference and the PAC checklist.
Flag inconsistencies, like a transportation report using an old unit count, an arborist plan that does not match the latest site plan, or a servicing report that references the wrong drawing date.
Chase missing items.
Assemble the application package.
Check file names, formats, drawing dates, report dates, author names, signatures, and required forms.
Submit the ZBA application through AST.
Receive the City’s payment instructions.
Pay the application fee.
Track the City’s complete or incomplete application decision.
Coordinate any update submission if the City says something is missing.
After the application is deemed complete, track circulation comments.
Copy City comments into a comment-response matrix.
Assign comments to the right consultant.
Push the team to respond.
Collect revised reports and drawings.
Check that the revised materials actually respond to the comments.
Prepare the resubmission package.
Submit the resubmission.
Repeat.
To be clear, this is not all of a ZBA application.
There are councillor meetings, community meetings, strategy calls, legal questions, public-relations questions, OLT risk, negotiations with City staff, decisions around height, setbacks, massing, parkland, servicing, access, garbage, loading, trees, and all of the other things that make development hard.
Those will all still require a human lead. But a lot of the rest probably won’t.
A lot of the work is coordination, tracking, checking, filing, chasing, comparing, formatting, renaming, emailing, summarizing, and making sure that everyone is working from the latest version of the same drawings.
This is exactly the kind of work that a good AI agent should be able to do. It’s also the kind of work that is very hard to do from your phone.
That’s important because if I’m sitting at my desk, with two monitors, a keyboard, every folder open, and a bunch of tabs already loaded, I can do a lot of this work myself. But then I’m probably not spending as much time as I should working on the business—meeting people, going to conferences, walking sites, meeting lenders, investors, consultants, builders, politicians, staff, and other developers. Less motion.
That is where a lot of the higher-value work happens. Strategy, partnerships, capital, recruiting, new ideas, new sites, new relationships, figuring out what the business should become. But the business does not stop needing things just because you are away from your desk. The gears have to keep turning.
Historically, principals have solved this by staffing up. And we will. But I think we are also going to have a digital colleague sitting in Slack who can do a lot of this work for us.
And not just for planning applications.
This is the part I’ve been thinking about more recently. A real estate development company is mostly a machine for moving a lot of information between a lot of people who all need slightly different versions of it. Architects, planners, engineers, lawyers, lenders, investors, accountants, trades, property managers, City staff, neighbours, councillors, and so on.
A lot of the job is just keeping the machine from getting jammed. Making sure the latest drawings are in the right folder. Making sure the pro forma has the latest cost estimate. Making sure the lender has the latest rent roll. Making sure the investor update matches what is actually happening on site. Making sure the invoice is coded to the right project. Making sure the consultant who said they would send something last Friday actually sends it.
This work is spread across all of the tools we already use. Slack for internal comms, Gmail for external comms, Drive for files, Sheets for trackers and pro formas, Agora for fundraising, and QuickBooks for accounting.
By next summer, I’m imagining being able to send a Slack message from my phone between meetings that says:
“Please turn these City comments into a tracker, assign them to the right consultants, check whether any of the latest reports already respond to them, and draft the follow-up email for me to review.”
Or: “Please check the latest drawings against the latest pro forma and tell me if the unit count, mix, GFA, parking, and commercial area still match.”
Or: “Please pull together everything the lender asked for, tell me what we’re missing, and draft emails to whoever has the missing pieces.”
Or: “Please look through these invoices, match them to the budget, flag anything weird, and prepare them for approval.”
And have that all done well, immediately, at any time of the day or night.
That would be incredibly useful.
The near-term goal will be to let us scale headcount much more slowly than we scale project count, and to help us spend more time working on the business rather than in the business without everything slowing down the moment we step away from our desks.
I’m betting that’s less than twelve months away.