After the Personal Agent

Source: original

Hello, and happy Sunday! Housekeeping note: We’re hosting our first paid subscriber meetup during New York Tech Week. Scroll down to learn more and RSVP.— Kate Lee__

Knowledge base

“We Gave Every Employee an AI Agent. Here’s What We’re Doing Differently Now.” by Brandon Gell and Willie Williams /Source Code__ : A few weeks after we launched our Plus One personal agents internally, everyone had their own AI agent. But it wasn’t working: The agents were unreliable, constantly broke, and needed too much upkeep. The problem wasn’t just the OpenClaw harness; it was the idea that every employee needed a personal agent. Read this for a retrospective from Brandon Gell and Willie Williams, and a preview of how Plus One 2.0 is being rebuilt around shared, reliable coworkers.

“Socrates as a Service” by Eleanor Warnock /Every : In a world where AI can search anything, the people who know how to extract tacit knowledge—the gold dust that isn’t on the internet—are getting more valuable, not less. Eleanor Warnock lays out seven techniques she keeps coming back to find the most interesting information. Read this for a working interviewer’s toolkit, and the case for why taste, judgment, and attention can’t be prompted.

“Opus 4.7 Reels Us Back In” by Laura Entis /Context Window : After weeks of Codex dominance, several members of the Every team have been pulled back to Opus 4.7. Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen has made it his default for synchronous work. Read this for the team’s case for switching back.Plus: A hack that spread through a widely used software package, a 30 percent drop in AI-tells complaints after Spiral added a top-edit step, and a better way to think about what an “agent” is.

“Mining Your Life for Context” by Laura Entis /Context Window : By the time you sit down to write an article, strategy memo, or launch page, you’ve probably already said most of what you want to say. It’s just in Slack threads, Notion documents, voice memos, and meeting transcripts. Laura Entis walks through a three-step workflow for mining all that scattered thinking before you draft. Plus: How AI entrepreneur Noah Brier uses Claude Code as a “second brain,” and the productivity regimen Codex’s Chronicle wrote for head of growth Austin Tedesco after analyzing his computer activity. 🎧 🖥 Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts , or watch YouTube.

“The Fallacy of the 16-hour Agent” by Katie Parrott /Context Window : New benchmarks claim autonomous AI can now handle 16-hour software-engineering tasks, and depending on which chart you saw, the takeaway is either “autonomous AI has arrived” or “we’re still years away.” Katie Parrott unpacks why both can be true and which version of the research to actually trust. Read this for a sharper read on long-horizon agent reliability.Plus: Perplexity’s methodology for building durable agent skills, and Dan Shipper ’s piano keyboard turned Codex-powered music coach.

Log on

We host camps and workshops on topics like compound engineering and writing with AI to share what we’ve learned from training teams at companies like the New York Times and leading hedge funds , and by using and experimenting with AI every day ourselves.

Upcoming event
In New York City