The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can
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- ARTICLE
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- @emollick
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- Jul 21, 2026
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An essay exploring whether AI agents can navigate messy, undocumented organizational processes by training on outcomes rather than encoding human expertise. It connects Richard Sutton's 'Bitter Lesson' and the 'Garbage Can Model' of organizations to argue enterprise AI adoption may not require mapping chaotic workflows.
Why it made the leaderboard
If you're deploying agents inside real organizations, this reframes the problem: instead of mapping chaotic, undocumented workflows, you may only need to define good outputs and let agents learn the path — a concrete lens for scoping enterprise AI adoption.
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aiagentsorganizationsmachine-learningenterprise-aireinforcement-learning
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