AI agent

“I don't think we're gonna have an uncanny valley problem here. I think these things are actually gonna feel very good when it praises you. You're actually gonna feel good. You're gonna want to get it right.”

“It'll probably get to a point where eventually it can just close the customer too, especially if it's SaaS or help a customer or try to set up phone calls to move over to your AEs.”

“Once you get to step three, the margins are going to three, four, or five X. Instead of making 20% EBITDA, you might be able to make 60% EBITDA, 80% EBITDA. And the reason why is because you're paying tokens and you're getting agents to do the work.”

“The difference between these steps and an AI agent is like here, these steps, I am telling Lindy when to do what. With any AI agent, I'm telling Lindy, you figure it out. And so I can give her a prompt for like some guidance about what to figure out and so for…”

“In Zapier, each step is an island. It's isolated. Here, it's an agent. It's an agent that is aware of the entire context of everything it did, and so if you want to do this with Zapier, you're going to have to write, like, an HTML parser. You may not be able t…”

“Cause sometimes AI agents get stuck in the loop. They go on like wild goose chases. Like don't try for too long. And so I gave it an off ramp here. We call those exit conditions.”

“I think we might even create bonds between founders and AI agents that are stronger than between founders and other founders because all this social tension between co-founders that is often quite strong, particularly when it's crunch time or when Runway is ru…”

“How do you build a smart agent that is going to be valuable? Start with one action that matters. Add LLM understanding. Build tight feedback loops, learn from every interaction, and expand slowly.”

“From the get go, being able to use AI agents to scale an AI agent company was kind of like an interesting kind of like inception like experience.”

“With AI agents and crew AI specifically, you don't need to have one agent to one task. It's not necessarily one to one.”

“As the use case has gotten more complex, you start to need more precision in more like a repeatability and consistency on their use cases. So usually people start with before and after hooks.”

“Previously someone would say this to me and I would just say like, no, because it's an administrative nightmare and you need to have an army of accountants and lawyers to do it all. And it just wouldn't make sense. But I think now, It totally makes sense to th…”

“People are saying that agents are going to automate everything, twenty-four-seven. There's some things that the human touch is going to be better, right? Like, me recording a video, if you know, signed up to one of our forums, maybe me actually recording a vid…”

“And I assume that that's going to happen in, in this space as well. Like you'll be, someone is going to create the design pickle, but for, you know, AI and agents. So if you can do that there's a path to a million dollars. That's for sure. Maybe even more.”

“And I think eventually AI agents will have access to component libraries like this, so they'll be able to just select, ah, really cool components like this and place them on your web apps, your mobile apps, ah, and things like that.”

“If it, if ChatGPT tells you OAuth, like, that's probably going to confuse your AI agent. It's just more steps.”

“Adding new marketing channels isn't a, you know, won't require hiring. It's literally just an agent away.”

“Marketing will resemble high frequency stock trading in the near future. Agents working 24, seven monitoring, surfacing opportunities, personalized micro interactions. You'll be like a portfolio manager or day trader, adjusting risk, deploying money based on r…”

“This new world, and which gets me so excited about this new world, is, you know, you don't have to raise millions of dollars or have a huge team to actually go and run with this. You basically need a single smart marketer with taste, of course. Pair that with …”

“In the next 12 to 18 months, we're gonna see an interconnected AI system working together with shared context. You're gonna have basically, ah, multiple AI agents and workflows, and these are gonna be managed by manager agents, trained by human experts.”

“So, if you don't do the automations yourself, or can't build AI agents yourself, which you can, hire someone to audit your process and build agents before bringing in full-time employees.”

“Literally talk to business owners about their daily Excel updates, because that's an AI agent waiting to be built.”

“Part of your job as kind of the quarterback of the AI agent with access to tools is you need to decide what tools it has or hasn't. The more tools you give it access to without corresponding instructions, the more it's just going to get confused, and it might …”

“I think, personally, that MCPs is kind of a buzzword. It's distracting you from the sauce, and it's distracting you from the core ideas that you should be focusing on, right?”

“I think if you, what I've noticed is if you don't create a PRD, the output ends up being worse, like very diluted. So what's cool about the PRD is you can kind of like drip feed context and because of that, because of how tight the drip feeding is, you end up …”

“For the first time ever, services are becoming software. It used to be software as a service, SaaS. But now with AI agents actually having the ability to fulfill the service. So let's say instead of hiring a social media manager, you're hiring an AI agent that…”

“You want the customer that you're selling to want to do that multiple times a day, because if it's high repetition and it's high value, then that's where the gold mine is.”

“But I think that, you know, the person that's going to end up creating this billion dollar one-person company is just going to, like, all of these things are going to be extremely dialed. All the rules are going to be dialed. All the references are going to be…”

“I just think that, you know, by starting as a leveraged agency, by starting doing these manual tasks, creating the agents you can decide if you want to be a VC backed Leverage agency, but this is just the best way to start so you have leverage when you want to…”

“I'm just a little weary of using agents right now because There are like occasional times where like it could go wrong, and just that like one percent Knowing that it could go wrong one percent just worries me for those like really high tier clients.”

“And the crazier thing that it does is it will actually negotiate the pricing with them. So basically is an AI agent that does like the research, the reach out, and then also the negotiation to like come to a deal. Once you've arrived at that deal, it will then…”

“There's an opportunity to use something like this and basically do client work, but the service is, instead of having literal humans do it, you have, I mean, you're going to have some humans manage it, but a lot less humans, maybe a 20th of the amount of human…”

“You need to think of it from the lens of what would a human being do? If I had a human being right here, they had a computer, they had our e-commerce site up on it. What would they do? Not what would an AI do? What would a human being with a computer do?”

“What's really powerful about the systems that we're going to go through today is that they exist in the same place where you're building your products and you can get your marketing work and your product work done in the same place and leverage skills and MCPs…”

“I don't want an agent to write into the files. Like I could easily get it to do that. Like I could just say, like even here, I've asked it to write a description of some commands that I can talk about today, but I don't want it to make a file to do this becaus…”

“I also had an agent that was running an Etsy shop for a little bit. That was crazy. It just got banned two days ago, which was hilarious.”

“Where I'm seeing this head personally is like, I'm going to build these tools. That an agent is going to have, and then it's going to be able to run this process in the background where it's basically has the ability to make new creative. It can publish that c…”

“Like, and again, this is just how I've been working for the last like six weeks. And it was like, maybe I could have like Two or three of them in the beginning, and now it's like, I'm comfortable with, like, we could have 15 windows open.”

“The orchestration layer is the new interface layer. As we spend our day coordinating agent workflows in a model agnostic fashion, local and cloud, and validating outputs, human in the loop and resolving issues, the ultimate layer To own is where coordination t…”

“The way I think of it is a chat model is question to answer, but then an agent is goal to result. So moving from just like, ah, you asking AI replies, then you do the work, to you giving the agent a task, it planning out the task, and then executing, and then …”

“So the easiest way to think about skills is SOPs for AI. So standing operated standing operated, oh my god, standard operating procedures for AI. It's a mouthful. It means once you explain something once, you never have to explain it ever again.”

“And with agents, you have to set up memory and control exactly what you give it. And I think that's actually a benefit, not a limitation, because what happens is if you're using ChatGPT and it's got the auto memory, you're having conversations about three diff…”

“And the way I like to think about building agents is onboarding them like a real employee. So if you took on a real executive assistant, you couldn't expect just for them to come into the office and you need to give them a task without explaining your business…”

“To work out what roles you want to start to build out an agent for, go into Claw or your favorite chat model and get it to help you build out those context files through an interview style process. Just say, ask me questions to build this out. I would connect …”

“By default, most of these agent harnesses, they just have web search baked in, but if you want to actually start linking it up to your tools like Gmail, Calendar, and everything else, which is where the real productivity gains are made, you need to do so, ah, …”

“The founders and employees that are utilizing agents are like, no word of a lie, 10 to 20 times more productive in their day.”

“So the way I think about my agent stack is that every builder, if you're listening to this, you're probably going to need five different layers. You're going to need an agent harness. So that's going to be something like a cloud code, cursor, codex, or idea br…”

“We bought mouses and keyboards, and we had human beings actually going and clicking and doing things, right? That's, you know, going to be the minority, as weird as it is to say that.”

“I saw that they had post, posted a job saying they were hiring a Firecrawl example creator, but they only wanted to hire an AI agent.”

“I think that, you know, it's not necessarily a thousand true fans anymore in the AI age, and this is something I've been thinking about. I think it's more like the hundred true, true fans, because agents are cutting your costs so dramatically that a hundred pe…”

“The agent autonomy is the vulnerability, and I believe that the potential is far bigger than phishing.”

“What, when you create a skill.md file, what gets added into the context is actually just the name and the description. Right? The bunch of info doesn't get added. So imagine you have two sentences versus an agent.md that has like a thousand lines that get adde…”

“So there's like this early area of investment that you have to make that sucks that nobody will tell you, especially agent harnesses company because they wouldn't raise as much money if they did. But like this, maybe I would give it two weeks. Because it took …”

“I don't download skills because your agent needs the context of a successful run, which you then turn to skills, right? And this is the big thing I see. You see skills marketplaces. You see download this and that. First of all, it's a easy way to attack somebo…”

“I believe templates are going to have a renaissance because if you have a solid like template, right, like whether it be like for a web app or mobile app, because that becomes context for the agent, it's going to build on top of that, right?”

“I saw that Gartner had a research report that said, 20% of commerce will, on the internet by 20 30 will be agents, meaning like agents are buying things.”

“If you think about where we were even a year ago and then you think about where we will be a year from now, you know it may just create its own Canva a year from now and then use that. It might be like, oh, it'd be way faster for me to just create my own tool …”

“The number one thing that you can do in a company right now, and we're talking to a lot of companies that are trying to implement AI, is just collect as many good examples as possible. This allows your agents to have examples that they can reference.”

“This is how I normally set up automations. People sometimes want to create an automation before they do it. It's just like do it once and then tell the agent to do that every time on this day. And that's a kind of a good workflow.”

“And, I mean, the TAM for that is, like, not even a trillion. It's, like, probably, like, the whole GDP of, like, all white-collar labor, which is, like, obviously many tens of trillions, right? Like, in, in even, like, the Western hemisphere alone.”

“Where I see the landscape fragmenting into like, there's going to be really easy, fun kind of prototyping tools and products that are kind of like easy to get started with, but then ultimately don't scale with you as you want to become like a real serious ente…”

“As you scale up, if you're the CEO of a business, like you just literally don't have time to go and like look at every single thing that every single person in the company has done. And so you need to create like better automated checks and balances to oversee…”

“And I think that we're probably three to six months out from being able to just can businesses off to AI to run at least basic businesses like this.”

“So, what I believe is that everything is changing, and we're doing a lot less of the moving pixels, moving rectangle and resizing things. We're doing a lot more judgment per minute. In fact, you know, For me, the agent is more like someone who's doing a lot of…”

“So basically this is for designers, and if you want to take the soul of the design and you want to bring that To the agent, and you want to bring a design system, the colors, the typography that makes the design beautiful. Well, you port it, and you put it all…”

“This is when people say, you know, agents are the new SaaS. What do they mean by that? They mean, you know, you're selling an agent with an outcome, you know, moving from a per seat model to an outcome based model”

“You brain dump in everything about yourself, interests, goals, ambitions, skill sets, things like that. So your agent has context around who you are, and then you reverse prompt based on what you know about me. What's the best way to do this?”

“Different skill sets needed. Use different profiles. One skill set, but just on multiple strands at once. Use sub agents.”

“The main takeaway here is that everyone is a manager now, and that reframe of making sure your agents are set up for success, like a manager would with their team, is the unlock in terms of how you look at this. It's not, I've got a new tool like Salesforce, o…”

“In order for an agent to have autonomy, they need these four things. They really need these four things. They need a clear goal, they need the skills, they need the tools, and they need the context. All of those to succeed and be autonomous.”

“And believe me, when you give the agent the floor to give assumptions, most of the time it's going to get it wrong, but not only is it going to get it wrong, it's going to burn a lot of money.”

“As more work moves to agents and chats and tools and feeds, real rooms actually become more valuable.”

“The mistake people I think make is they try to build an all knowing agent first, these really big agent projects. The better move is basically just to build a small agent to start, get it to be very valuable, schedule it, have a clear success metric.”

“If people are already paying for the work, they're paying an employee, they're paying an agency, a receptionist, a coordinator, dispatcher, they, there's an opportunity to sell that service cheaper And then unload some of that work that that person is doing to…”

“You actually want to shadow the human before you build. So once you find the job, right, you, you've identified what the job is before you like prompt, before you start coding, just shadow a human being who does the job. I know a lot of founders want to skip t…”

“So the fastest path is usually a pilot where you manually do the work with AI, and then you productize the repeated parts.”

“I think the opportunity is basically to find the smallest painful workflow that repeats all day in a niche that you understand and make it disappear.”

“Many agent problems should start actually as workflows. So a workflow follows a predictable path. An agent decides more dynamically. Founders should earn autonomy by starting with the predictable path and adding judgment only when it creates value.”

“So if a workflow is too basic basically the problem is basic automation, you know, zaps and stuff like that can do it. If it's pure human judgment the first version will break. So the sweet spot is repetitive work with enough judgment that AI can help.”

“Labor is a multi-trillion dollar market, right? So I think why people say agents is bigger than SaaS is because the total addressable market for agents is just way bigger. You know, it's human capital.”

“Most people hear agent and imagine a fully autonomous employee. And that's how you get these demos that you see on Twitter and they don't really work and it ends up being a bad business.”

“Actually, the way I would think about this, Ellie, and tell me if I'm wrong here, I would actually do a bug loop separate from a feature loop. So the bug loop would be around like uptime, you know, like the objective metric would be more around uptime and thin…”

“The more you become a better agent manager actually the more technical you become.”

“And in in order to survive in this new world, you're going to work a lot more, not a lot less.”

“Essentially you are a manager of agents now. So no matter what you used to do, whether it was a people manager, an IC, you are going to become a manager of agents now, and you need to be the best in the world.”

“It's very important to keep your keys safe, secure, and separated from the agent, right? So I've got all my prod write keys in one password. I do not give my agents a prod write keys. So production writing is dangerous, right? And your agents will do something…”

“The play is basically, how do you find plugins that have validated demand that don't have an AI component and building the AI first version of each? Cause You already know that, you know, there's proven demand, people are paying for it, and then you just make …”

“My dream is eventually to have, like, the ability to FaceTime agents. And that to me is like the holy grail of the future of work.”

“Now there is one mistake that I want to warn against, which is more agents don't automatically mean better output. Sometimes actually more agents mean more noise. Sometimes it means five AI workers confidently repeating the same wrong idea. Sometimes it means …”

“In the early days, your first customer is often the person already selling into the niche. So instead of trying to sell agent readable competitive analysis to a med spa owner, which is a phrase that is just confusing to the average person. Sell it to med spa m…”

“Now, I think the types of businesses to create are businesses like this. They're not like little tools that could be vibe coded. These are startup ideas that, you know, could be profitable on day one that, you know, have some moat that are, you know, are reinv…”

“I think that there's going to be a venture-backed companies, and you're already starting to see it happen, doing these horizontal products that do this. The opportunity here is to go extremely vertical.”

“Well, we're moving into a future where agents are going to have wallets. They're going to have email addresses. And assuming that's true, and I think, you know, there's a good chance that that happen is happening happens because it's already starting to happen…”

“So the shift is websites become resource layers. Content becomes indexes. Expertise becomes scalable. Data becomes metered and tools become agent accessible.”

“The filter is pretty simple. The data should be valuable. It should, the data should be repeatable changing, fragmented, and annoying.”

“So I have my AI chief of staff is Simon. Simon runs like this whole org. And so I have 34 AI agents that work in this workforce.”

“Like, I can tell you that CMOs, all of them are asking about, like, how do I get discovered by agents? How, what does the agent first shopping experience look like? What does brand consideration in the AI age look like? You know, all of that is being considere…”

“I feel like managing agents feels like I am their direct manager, and I'm like, Susie, go over there, and Betty, go over there, and Jeremy, go over here, and I feel like I am three rungs above at like an SVP overseeing level where I feel like I am setting up t…”

“Why I like rock bot and how I use it is I only add an agent if we really like needed, I just, I'm so anti idea creep and agent creep because that's how you burn tokens. That's how you'd spin your wheels. That's how you don't make process progress.”

“And you train these agents the same way you train a new hire. You start with small tasks, you watch at work, you correct the mistakes, You add the correction to memory, because now we have memory, and then you expand the scope as you increase your comfort leve…”

“Agents are moving from answering questions. They're operating tools and phones is one of the biggest tool services in the world.”

“This is just how I, by the way, side note, this is how I'm thinking before I hire anyone. I'm like, should I just do, get an agent to the, To do this. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but that's been the default of how I've been thinking as I'm building my company…”