**Main Idea:** The current era of agentic AI is similar to the pre-assembly-line era and the post-assembly-line era. The similarity is that, prior to the assembly line, jobs were not decomposed into discrete tasks - they were just holistic jobs to be done (e.g., assembling a car. One person might do this whole job end-to-end). After Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, these jobs became unbundled into tasks that could then be executed more efficiently. The same is happening to knowledge work now, with agentic AI forcing us to unbundle jobs so that we can apply an agent to specific tasks within our jobs Core Sources: - Kindle - *Shop Management* by Frederick Winslow Taylor - *The Principles of Scientific Management* by Frederick Winslow Taylor - *The People's Tycoon* by Steven Watts - *From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932* by David Hounshell - *Reengineering the Corporation* by Michael Hammer and James Champy - *Ford Methods and the Ford Shop* by Horace Arnold and Fay Faurote - _On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures_ by Charles Babbage - To borrow from the library: - _Wheels for the World_ by Douglas Brinkley - _Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company_ by llan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill - *The Second Industrial Divide* by Michael Piore and Charles Sabel - _Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920_ by Daniel Nelson - _Scientific Management in Action_ by Hugh G. J. Aitken