The Exchanges

Q tasks that you as the human being are going to be doing or to the sets of tasks and what are the sets of tasks That the agents are going to be doing that you're okay with them doing and keeping you in the loop. So my question for you around automations is beyond, beyond QA, what are some other automations that, you know, a, a founder could be implementing?

A So, um, let me pull up my list for you. So the kind of automations that I have are, uh, clearly, uh, uh, QA bug fix fine. Um, the other is what I call my production watchdog. Um, so we've got a lot of real law firms using Untangle. We've got a lot of real clients, you know, going through discovery and we've got, with just a huge amount of activity. And, and honestly, I can't keep track of it, uh, you know, mentally by just looking through logs. And so what I do is every day at nine AM, I have what's called a production watchdog automation. Which what it does is it goes through all of the events in the database that happened for our paid customers, and it summarizes that in a JSON file. And then that JSON file is in our admin, and then I, you know, know every morning I go in and I click on the production watchdog and I read through the summary of what the customers did. And it's so valuable. Um, so it's sort of like you can imagine, you know, your chief of staff showing up and saying, you know, all right, Greg, here's the important stuff that happened yesterday for our customers.

AI assessment note: “The other is what I call my production watchdog.”

Q Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people like on X who are sort of like local maxis who look at people who spin up virtual machines and cloud agents as sort of like Amateurish. What do you say to people like that?

A They, they are not, they are not doing real work. Um, here's the deal, right? So as soon as we hit PMF with Untangle and we, and we started acquiring real customers and having to ship real fixes, real features, like I had to probably 50 X my output, right? Um, and you just can't do it if you're working locally. So I think It's, it's nice to work locally, and sometimes you have to if you're doing heavy front end stuff. So say, say you're shipping a brand new feature with a lot of UI, like a lot of new UI, right? Then, yes, of course, you're probably going to spin up a local agent, and you're going to do some light front end, you know, probably wireframing. Um, but as quickly as you can, you want to move that into the cloud, and then let a cloud agent take over. Um, so I think this is happening to a lot of people. I think A lot of the traditional Knowledge of how to work is, is, is out of date. Um, that's where we're at.

AI assessment note: “They, they are not, they are not doing real work.”

Q Okay, so if you do start using cloud agents and you do 50 x output, you know, in some ways that is a little stressful because you have so much stuff going on, right? And now all of a sudden you have to manage more. So how do you, how do you structure a system so you don't go absolutely crazy?

A It's interesting. I think, first of all, you have to shift Your expectation of what your work is and what your work is now is making high stakes decisions almost all day. So in the past, like we all had the luxury of making probably, you know, at most maybe two to three high stakes decisions per day, right? You'd have an important meeting with your key team or with a customer and you'd make a couple important decisions and you would communicate those decisions and then they would get done over, you know, two weeks. Um, you know, I think you have to sort of mentally pace yourself to say, probably by lunch, you're going to have made, you know, 10 to 20 high stakes decisions. Um, and so you have to learn how to do that. So, which is your question, how do you do that? Um, and I think there's a couple simple things, right? Um, so when I'm working with my agents, I actually have to organize my threads by, and I pin the ones that are the most important work we're getting done today, right? Because there's a lot of quick bug fixes or, you know, small things you're shipping. And you kind of learn to separate into two buckets. What are the big, big important things I'm getting done today? Pin those. And, and then the other things, just let them rip and get back to them when you can. Um, and then set yourself this kind of, uh, almost timer, right? Where you're like, okay, I'm gonna go cra…

AI assessment note: “I actually have to organize my threads by, and I pin the ones that are”

Q I wanted. I wanted you just to vomit everywhere because, like, It's sort of like advice that you, you, you would give to your, to your nephew, I think, um, or a twenty-year-old, um, you know, a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college. It's like, what are the minds I need to know in terms of managing agents? So is there anything else that people need to know? Cloud agents, automations?

A Yeah, cloud, automations. Like, those are the two that I want people to walk away from. I guess the third is, is really, you will be using a software factory. Like, and what I mean is, the agents are going to be writing a hundred percent of your code, reviewing a hundred percent of your code, shipping a hundred percent of your code. Like, that's where we're going. Um, and so, the, the more you can get there, the, the better. Thing one, uh, thing two. I think, you know, thing three is, um, it, It is important to build, um, uh, a credible reputation for yourself, right? And I will say, you know, the work I put in over, you know, the last 20 years on X, like, it really pays dividends. And what I mean by that is, if you, if you share what you're learning publicly, and you generally give, like, write very helpful articles on X, um, And obviously the algo really does reward articles still. So you should be writing articles on X. Um, you should absolutely be on X, no matter how you feel about Elon.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, cloud, automations. Like, those are the two that I want people to walk away”

Q So, and for people who don't know what agents.md is and the importance of it, can you give a quick primer on it?

A You bet. So what, it's a very simple file, it's literally a markdown file, and think of it as notes that you would give to a new developer who had never seen your code. And the neat thing is you can have an agents.md file in every, every folder in your entire repo if you want. And what happens is AMP will, if it, AMP starts looking at a, a file in a folder and it sees an agents.md file in that folder, it will read it first. So it's cool. It's like sticky notes everywhere, right? So it's like if you, you know, have some knowledge about this part of the code base and you really want the dev to know, hey, before you mess with stuff, read this. Um, that's what agents.md does. So you can have it at the top of your folders directory. So that gets read every time the agent works, or you can put it, bury it down in some subfolder so that it, it just reads that, uh, when it's editing that file. Um, so that, so that's really, really important. If you don't do this, you're going to have a bad time over and over again. Um, and then it, what it does is it updates a progress.txt file. Um, this is like short-term memory. So this is like saying, hey, during, during these 10 iterations that Ralph is going to do, What are some things that we're kind of learning? What are we doing? Um, how does all this work? I'm actually going to show you, um, actually I won't show you example cause it's a bunch…

AI assessment note: “it's literally a markdown file, and think of it as notes that you would give”

Q So, I, I keep hearing this, that Devin is, is almost, you know, it's the most powerful coding agent, and You know, can you just, for folks who haven't heard of Devin or, or who haven't played with it, like, why is that?

A What is going on? So, um, so about two years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, Devin came out and they pitched it as this idea of like, it's a software engineer, right? And honestly, it didn't work very well, right? The, the models were just not good enough. And no matter how good the harness was, the models just weren't there. Um, and then fast forward to, you know, 20, 26, um, The models are definitely good enough, and when you have a good harness that is cloud-based, Um, it's really good. So think of it as, you've got your choices, right? So if you're using agents to build things, you're probably using Codex, you know, from OpenAI, or using Cloud Code from Anthropic, or you're using one of the indie, I call them the indie agent harnesses. You've got AMP, you've got Cursor, which is not independent anymore, but sorta, uh, owned by Elon. Um, and then you've got Cognition, which makes Devon. You've got factory, uh, as another one as well. So you've got these choices, right? And so I thought, okay, I want to scale myself horizontally. Like, I want to be able to run as many agents as I possibly can, and I don't want to be working on my laptop and trying to figure out Which code is colliding? You know, which work tree am I on? All, a lot of technical stuff that really it's, it keeps you from shipping. Um, and you know, I know there's a lot of different folks that listen to the …

AI assessment note: “when you have a good harness that is cloud-based, Um, it's really good.”