In the beginning there was a machine that could talk like most of us. Maybe not as smart yet coherent enough. We realized it needs to do more. As good computer scientists, we know Garbage In, Garbage Out; we need to feed this talking machine interesting context for it to be smarter.
RAG came up - we were able to push relevant data the machine could spew out in a coherent and convincing packing. There’s a challenge, not everything can be solved with search or information retrieval.
A good AI must be able to act, and maybe plan, or appear to do so.
We brought in the tools. Created functions, plugins, and recently MCP (model context protocol) and the A2A (agent to agent) protocol. I’ve never seen any other protocol get adopted as fast. A few years back, there used to be committees to think through and propose the correct™ specification.
Not any more.
Why you’d wonder?
The wrong problem
Our agents can build protocols, tools, software, artwork, and what have you. Just so that you can focus on the thing that matters.
WTF! A bunch of us oldies thought software programming is creativity. We even raised our art and called ourselves craftsmen. We’ve debated everything from choosing the right editor to the correct delineation (tab vs space). We know our craft.
Let our agents do that, so you can focus on the thing that matters.
The agent decides the protocol spec, it creates the reference servers and clients, all the way up. A change in protocol burns a few million tokens at the worst.
We don’t need a committee for this. Instead this committee can ask agents to churn tokens while they do more important things.
Stop working on the wrong problem, and do the thing that matters?
Grunt begets grunt
Before we find the important things™, let’s talk about our day right now.
It took 153 commits to port arey, a simple ~18 file python commandline app to rust over several weeks. I’ll talk about the lessons in another post. The key challenge: who’s going to review this?
I asked AI to write tests. What if it writes wrong code and an equally wrong test accompanying it? Who’ll find the issue?
A key paradigm change is in order. While we used to swear by craftsmanship, quality, and the art of writing code, the present is about the art of reading and reviewing code.
All that said, I’m churning code much faster than ever with AI.
A part of my job is to review documents and proposals. Guess who’s writing all the docs these days? An AI. And who’s reviewing all of that?
Let our agents do that, so you can focus on the thing that matters.
This doesn’t sound any true right now when you’re bombarded with sloppy code to review, or the same monotonic proposals. I too will use agents to review.
But isn’t this a game of Monkey in the Middle. I am the monkey trying to catch the ball played by agents.
I used AI to automate my grunt work, and here I’m reviewing the grunt created by AI.
The important thing™
The elephant in the room is AI creates, AI reviews, AI commits and thus I am out of a job. Or, a corollary, AI now does everything that mattered in my job.
I don’t think so.
I wish I could hold the AI and ding it for the Severity 2 incident it created last week. I can’t do that. I still put the accountability on the human.
So, our job to create value remains the same; with the unfortunate side effect of dealing with some chaos for now. It’s a phase like any other, well until, we build an AI on-call that we can hold accountable.
Note that phase by phase we’re transitioning a layer of the work from coding to monitoring and on-call.
Once this phase is done, all of us are CTOs with a bunch of agents to command.
Still, the value creation stays with us, just like the CXOs today steer a 200K employee organization to create value for stakeholders.
It’s you, not the AI
There’s the hype of what AI is capable of. This set is changing every day, literally. Models are powerful than ever before.
Then there’s us, the tool wielder. We’re trying hard to tame AI to our ways, and it is a struggle every day.
The good news is we’re used to this struggle. Do you think it would’ve been easy to rub stones to create fire? If you were a student who struggled to create fire, would your teacher blame the stones or you?
It’s you. It’s us.
Learn the tool. Or create one that just works™. And don’t forget to sit back and enjoy the evolution live show.