Read this last station more skeptically than the rest. Everything before this point stood on documented history or on arguments you could check against your own floor. From here on we are forecasting: claims about the early 2030s, phrased so that they can turn out to be wrong — and offered by a walk that has already admitted its founding story is a parable.
Here is the extrapolation. Software development was not special — it was merely first. It happened to be the workplace where the work turned into a token stream earliest, which is why this street spent four stations there. But the same transformation is moving through every function an agent can run. Procurement negotiations conducted by agents. Support triage decided by agents. Infrastructure operated, compliance checked, claims processed, schedules planned — each of these, the moment an agent runs it, becomes what the codebase became around 2023: a factory floor whose entire operation is a stream of transcripts. Purpose, process, and people do not stop applying when the operator stops being human. They just stop being asked, because nobody can find the floor.
So the accountability question of Station 6 scales into the organizing principle of the agentic decade, and it fits in one sentence: whoever is accountable for an agentic system must be able to stand in it. Able — meaning the transcripts exist, the replay works, the person has the training to read what they replay, and the calendar actually contains the hours. An accountability that cannot stand in its system is a signature on a floor nobody has visited.
The legibility crisis
What we expect instead, through the late 2020s, is organizations deploying agentic systems faster than they develop walkers for them: fleets of agents doing consequential work, governed through dashboards summarizing transcripts nobody reads, overseen by committees reviewing the dashboards. Not through malice — through the same gravity this whole street has documented, now acting on floors that never had a walking tradition to lose. Procurement never had an Ohno. Support operations never had a Womack. The gemba discipline will have to be imported into those functions at exactly the moment their gemba becomes hardest to see.
Regulation adds an instructive irony. The emerging AI rulebooks mandate logging: high-risk systems must record what they did, retain the records, produce them on demand. Which means regulation is quietly manufacturing the artifact of the gemba — wall after wall of transcripts — without the discipline that gives the artifact meaning. Compliance produces records; only management produces walkers. An organization can satisfy every logging obligation on earth and still have no human being who has ever stood in its systems. The circle cannot be legislated. It can only be drawn.
The three questions, one last time
Stand in a fully agentic operation — say, 2030, a supply-chain function running on a fleet of negotiating agents — and ask what you have carried since the prologue.
Purpose. Is this system solving a customer’s problem, or has it become a machine for generating impressive waste faster than any human organization ever could? Overproduction at token speed is still overproduction; an agent that drafts forty procurement strategies nobody asked for is the first press at Station 1, running because it can.
Process. Is the harness capable — in exactly Station 3’s sense? Does each guide steer, does each sensor catch, is the system available when demand arrives, adequate to its volume, flexible when the work changes? A harness is a process standing still; walk it step by step like any other.
People. Are the humans around this system engaged in improving it — reading its transcripts, tightening its harness, arguing with its purpose — or are they riding it, approving its outputs unread and forwarding its numbers upward? A workforce that merely rides its agents has the same relationship to them that Station 4’s managers had to their dashboards. The questions survive because they were never about factories. They were about work, and there is still work.
The circle, redrawn
We have reached the end of the street. Turn around and look back down the yellow line: the press line at Station 1, the doctrine, the walk, the long dissolve, the three-layered floor, the question of who stands. Now look down at your feet.
There is a chalk circle here too. It is drawn around a transcript.
Someone in your organization should be standing in it — today, this week, on a schedule the calendar defends — reading what the machines and their people actually did, five sessions end to end, eyes trained for the seven shapes of waste. Not because a framework demands it. Because the knowledge of what is actually happening exists in exactly one place, and it has never once survived the trip into a report.
The floor changed. The circle didn’t. Stand in it.