Ashwin Sreenivas, co-founder of Decagon, discusses the current limits of AI agents in replacing human engineering and product judgment.
Opinion
Sreenivas: AI startups relying permanently on FDEs become glorified consultancies
“Once you know what the workflow is, you should not be relying on forward deployed engineers anymore, because once you know what the workflow is, If you can productize it, you should productize it and then become, you know, typical company with these scaling pr…”
Insight
Sreenivas: Deploying custom open-source models eliminates major AI cost pressures
“If we ran our entire business exclusively on frontier models, I would care a lot about costs, and I would think a lot about that, but once you're already, once you've already made the jump to saying, okay, now, now we know how to think about open source models…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sreenivas: AGI will not replace software because agents still need infrastructure
“I think even once you have AGI, all our AGI agents are going to need somewhere to store work and pull information from and reason about things. So I think, you know, a certain class of SaaS companies that were solely built for people to do work might face a bi…”
Insight
Sreenivas: Early-stage AI startups need forward-deployed engineers for unproven workflows
“Forward deployed engineers are necessary or newly necessary for early stage AI companies because the workflows are new. Right? If you're building a SaaS company five years ago, most SaaS products are pretty well explored, right? Like you roughly know what the …”
Insight
Sreenivas: AI productivity gains will drive companies to build more, not fire
“Everybody has access to these tools, and so if our competitors are going to use them and build more things, we need to build more things, right? If somebody else said, oh, here's our roadmap, and now we can get through it in, you know, a third of the time, and…”
Insight
Sreenivas: Optimizing AI agents breaks the cost, latency, and performance tradeoff
“Performance latency and accuracy is definitely the driving factor for most of this, right? Cost is a nice benefit in that, you know surprisingly, this is one of the few like tasks where you kind of get all the things for free, right? Like we don't actually hav…”