BENGALURU — Senior engineer Arjun Backend has been assigned the routine task of converting a glowing circle from Grocery.ai’s funding presentation into a fully autonomous digital employee.
The Jira ticket says AGENT-01 must make independent decisions, coordinate departments, improve morale and demonstrate investor value before the next board meeting. Its only acceptance criterion is: “Should work autonomously.”
No workflow, system design, company data or definition of autonomy was attached. A follow-up meeting added one requirement: the system should be “proactive, but aligned.”
“The deadline is clear. It is everything before the next board meeting.”
Arjun asked who would approve its autonomous decisions. Product management assigned the question back to Arjun and moved the ticket to In Progress.
When he requested a specification, he received the 96-slide pitch deck with a comment asking him to focus on solutions rather than gaps.
Human Resources Devi announced an AI-readiness programme before development began. She said employees needed time to accept a transformation whose details were confidential because they did not exist.
Arjun created requirements_needed.md. It was classified as a blocker because its title sounded insufficiently optimistic. After three design reviews, the glowing circle changed from blue to electric blue. The repository remained empty.
This story is fictional. Names, organisations and quotes were invented for comedy. Any resemblance to your production environment should be escalated after the sprint.