Basis co-founder Mitch Trojanowski discusses architectural strategies for designing memory and ontologies for long-horizon AI agents.
Opinion
Trojanowski: Applying the Bitter Lesson to Complex Tax Workflows Is a Mistake
“I think it is a mistake to throw out those learnings and say, you know, bitter lesson, throw out those learnings. We're just going to have the agents at runtime develop an entirely new way to do a tax return that is, you know, because bitter lesson, yada, yada…”
Insight
Trojanowski: Technical AI moats are not real moats
“Technical moats are not real moats. Like, I, there's no portion of basis's long-term terminal value that stems from some, you know, secret RL trick we found that nobody else found.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Trojanowski: AI coding agents remain worse than junior engineers over two-week projects
“Even now with coding, like, the agents are not yet they're not human level at being coherent over long periods of time. That's obvious because they can't code like a junior engineer on a project for two weeks. So they can't, they're, that's worse than a human …”
Opinion
Trojanowski: Enterprise agents need process reliability, not 'Move 37' breakthroughs
“And so the thing that you know, someone is buying from us is not, this will be the best ever tax return. They're buying that, you know, the confidence... They're buying that it's going to be consistent and reliable and something that they can trust that actual…”
Insight
Trojanowski: 10-Hour Agent Runs Are Not Black Boxes
“Not thinking that an agent operating over 10 hours is a black box. It's not. It has a lot of data, and you're probably doing a disservice to your customers if you don't understand, like, how it's going about the work.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Trojanowski: Closing the agent self-improvement loop will be close by year-end
“I think that closing the loop is gonna happen pretty fast.
I think you'll have, like, I don't know about the entire loop being closed, but I think you'll be
Relatively close by end of year.”