- LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole.

- There are harnesses available as open source libraries but that’s still coupled to an environment. Where does the state persist? Like maybe I’m a Cloudflare worker and don’t even have a file system.

Agent as a service like this lets you plug in the tools it needs to be whatever kind of agent you want. But they still get to encapsulate and continue to iterate on the really deep parts of the harness that all agents need like memory and context management.

That said, my money right now is not on the offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic because they’re stuck using their own proprietary frontier models and those aren’t actually the best choice for most agents right now. A competitor who is not an LLM lab gets their pick of the market at any given moment. Like you’d want to be using GLM 5.3 Flash right now for most things agentic.

That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.

The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.

I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).

Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.

Everyone’s hung up on how nobody really does waterfall. Or course. But a LOT of people are vibing their code and making PRs and then getting buried in code reviews. Just like the article says, you can’t keep up that way. Obviously. Only agents can review code as fast as agents write it. But I find as of recently that agents review code better than people now, just like how they write it better. Gotta lean into it!

So maybe you should write it down?

I see this going differently than they do. An exoskeleton that makes you 5% stronger is not a game changer. Companies that lean fully into agents won’t just be “humans, but a little better.” They’ll move orders of magnitude faster, make decisions in less time, do it ask more efficiently. It will be no contest.

Plus you get a wildly different payoff the more you can take humans completely out of the loop. If it writes the code but humans review, you’re still bottleneck. If it designs and codes and reviews and goes back to designing, and so on, there’s no effective speed limit.

Big businesses aren’t going to work that way though. Which is why we shouldn’t be looking to them as thought leaders right now.

The 60x number is real but I know it'll be controversial. It's lines of code in a month vs. what I'd produce in a year by hand. Your mileage will vary. I'm not claiming everyone gets this. I'm saying the range of individual experiences is so wide that averages are meaningless.

Yes, this is another post about vibe coding. But it's a real product with real users at this point, more than a weekend project, and I think the health and communication effects are worth talking about even if the productivity claim doesn't land for you.

Happy to answer questions.

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