agents are misunderstood and that is the heart of the problem with adoption. companies expect to replace current employee workflows with agents but ai will always fail at this because the accountability structures within the company won’t allow it. what do you do when a person messes up? you reprimand them. you have an organization that is designed to correct people issues so this is easy. but what do you do when you drop an agent into this type of system and the agent makes a mistake? you don’t have the structure in place to resolve the issue so you end up in a failed state that you can’t recover from. this is what we are seeing is happening in companies. coding is different because the workflow for code (design, code, review, merge, test) is resilient to mistakes. you don’t generally trust any code from a dev without review/test so the dev portion of the process can be more fungible. but something like customer service doesn’t really work like this. there is no review step…it’s all live fire. then there are things like accounting workflows —something i’ve been working on. there is no generally agreed on tooling to handle things like a quarterly close that makes the human fungible. the workflow is usually filled with tribal knowledge and caveats that the agent designer probably didn’t know about. so really the tools / workflows need to be rebuilt to be ai first then people can adopt agents within the context of the tool. for many companies this will be very hard to do so we will continue to see failed pilots. the companies that will succeed will have one or more of the following; 1) no existing workflows thus they can tool up and agentify from ground up. 2) the understanding that you can’t replace existing workflows with agents but you can replace new flows with agents. 3) a very strong sponsor who can cram new workflows / tooling down the throat of the organization.

unless of course the kids need losses....

llms make it so easy to write/edit/delete tests that tests are probably useless now.

allowing your swarm to join a collective to defend against swarms.... cool idea.

building the thing that builds the thing is the thing to do in the future.

"software engineering" today is really just dev ops. i spend most of my day wrangling servers now. and a small part on architecture.

Build in secure places.

"You won't lose your job to AI. You will lose your job to somebody who's using AI." Oh wait.

more and more of my business logic is finding its way into the database. what does this mean?

Sadly EVERYONE will have this moment sometime in the next 5 years. I had this moment 3.5 years ago, and it took me a while (two years) to recover. I think experiencing it sooner rather than later is probably better, but one way or another, that moment is inevitable.

Main issue is: why would you need to learn this?

i’m reminded of that part in the social network where marks character says something like: “You're gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” founders, the buck stops with us. always. it’s not our job to get rich or go to nice parties. it’s our job to build the systems that usher in the future. and if we fail to bring people along with us, that’s our failure. no one else’s.

It’s a parody but also a glimmer at the future. Any intelligence constrained problem will be solved. No matter how small. What an incredible future.

Comedy.

Next we will figure out that the best AI is AI you never use. Things will just occur. AI will make them happen. But you will not be putting text into a chat box.

everyone

On one hand, AI is incredibly effective at helping us create value. On the other, we’ve taken 20 years of security best practices and thrown them out the window. Full OS access for agents and AI-coded apps can have huge security holes and create a massive maintenance burden.

im telling you astra only wants to do 5k line changes.