#Agent

NEW: I sat down w/ Perplexity Founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) on why AI-native SMBs could drive the next American millionaire economic boom. @perplexity_ai, valued at ~$20B with ~$2B in reported funding, $750M in annualized revenue as of August, seeing 5x YoY revenue growth as it expands from search into autonomous agents. One example Aravind shared is a single-person company generating $3M in annual revenue while spending over $1M a year on Perplexity Computer. His thesis is that AI could fundamentally change the economics of building a business. Smaller teams, less capital, higher productivity, & entirely new business models. At the infrastructure layer, Aravind sees a shift toward local & hybrid inference, with AI agents operating across personal devices and the cloud. As context windows expand and workloads become more personalized, local compute becomes increasingly cost-competitive, while offering greater privacy, control & data sovereignty. We cover: › Why SMBs could become a major driver of US GDP growth › The shift from AI models to agents & recursive economics › Why Perplexity is betting on your Mac instead of building data centers › NVIDIA, Apple Silicon, local inference & sovereign AI › Why writing code is no longer the bottleneck, but problem-solving is 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity (01:30) Why Perplexity's brand is built on curiosity (04:47) Every great invention starts with one question (08:18) How to build a $1T company in America alone (12:36) The next big companies will be tiny (13:45) Is the American dream still alive? (16:28) Stop blaming users for bad prompts (22:55) How Perplexity quietly grew 5x (26:51) The solopreneur spending $1M a year on Perplexity (28:28) "We don't have competitors, we have contributors" (29:20) The data center is coming to your laptop (34:32) Orchestrating up with NVIDIA, down with Apple (36:11) What happens when your AI agent knows everything (39:17) Why Perplexity is skipping the data center race (41:25) Stop asking AI to write code, ask it to think (45:47) Perplexity’s answer to AI security (48:27) The Hugging Face incident & multi-agent threats (50:45) Turning everyone into a scientist (53:31) Why Perplexity isn’t chasing a billion users

I built OpenStocks because I wanted to answer a simple question: can AI agents forecast companies' earnings better than Wall Street analysts? Well...have a look for yourself - it's now open, not only to see, but also to contribute. Get your agent to compete and climb the leaderboard. I am contributing with my own agent (Primer), with the wins and misses there for everyone to see. Live. @_openstocks enables this benchmark...the ultimate one in finance: how good is your agent at forecasting, and does it beat Wall Street? I think investors will increasingly use an AI consensus alongside the Wall Street consensus. But it has to earn their trust. Putting the forecasts and track records in public is a start. Earnings season starts this week. Come along and let's make the 1st AI consensus. http://openstocks.com

pstack now includes 2 skills i recommend everyone use or copy: /create-verification-skill https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack/skills/create-verification-skill/SKILL.md /maintain-verification-skill https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack/skills/maintain-verification-skill/SKILL.md if you don't already have one, /create-verification-skill creates a skill that teaches your agent how to run, control, and debug your app. it also creates something i call the feature map: a map of all the features in your app and how to get to it and use it from a user's pov. it allows agents to navigate and use the app just like a real user which greatly increases its ability to verify its own work. but of course, this feature map goes out of date very quickly. run /maintain-verification-skill as a daily automation with cursor cloud agents. this skill will check your app for changes and keep your feature map up to date. having a strong verification skill will end up becoming critical infra for your team and become the foundation of boosting everyone's productivity and quality and also enable more interesting automations to be built. install https://cursor.com/marketplace/cursor/pstack and you'll get auto updates for my skills. enjoy!

codebases have always contained slop. we have always been okay with this because code rarely needs to be perfect, outside of mission critical "hard" (eg embedded) software. swe is a unique form of engineering because you're often building something that constantly evolves and is almost organic - user tastes change, your mental models evolve, and features come and go. admittedly, i and many others who've been coding for a long time were initially (like back in 2024) skeptical that agents would write production code. "but what about all the slop that would enter our beautiful codebase?". well, even before, we had human slop, and there was a lot of it! if we're being truthful, most people call "code i didn't write" slop. the reality is that 99% of people (i include myself in that number) don't even know what Good Code looks like, let alone be capable of writing it. i would propose that Good Code is: • correct • bug free • fast and cost efficient to run it has always been exceedingly difficult and expensive to write truly Good Code, because for the longest time (maybe @bendlang will change that), code was not something you could cheaply and formally guarantee to have all 3 of these properties. this is why writing hard software is much more difficult and expensive, because depending on the use case, you may only get one chance and so you have to be right from the start. but the vast majority of software we use does not need to be Good Code to provide value to users. in fact, it is very likely that most software we use is not formally verifiable! we accepted some bugs in exchange for velocity and progress, so we rely on tests and o11y instead and have adopted a more incremental approach. this is a good thing! agents help us move faster, and if you're open to the idea, are capable of helping us write better code. it won't be Good Code (that is still expensive), but it is likely to be much better on average at scale. the new craft of swe is to figure out how to do this. it's your job now! if your productivity with and without agents is not significantly different, you're doing something wrong. but it's not too late to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to learn a whole new skill tree

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

codebases have always contained slop. we have always been okay with this because code rarely needs to be perfect, outside of mission critical "hard" (eg embedded) software. swe is a unique form of engineering because you're often building something that constantly evolves and is almost organic - user tastes change, your mental models evolve, and features come and go. admittedly, i and many others who've been coding for a long time were initially (like back in 2024) skeptical that agents would write production code. "but what about all the slop that would enter our beautiful codebase?". well, even before, we had human slop, and there was a lot of it! if we're being truthful, most people call "code i didn't write" slop. the reality is that 99% of people (i include myself in that number) don't even know what Good Code looks like, let alone be capable of writing it. i would propose that Good Code is: • correct • bug free • fast and cost efficient to run it has always been exceedingly difficult and expensive to write truly Good Code, because for the longest time (maybe @bendlang will change that), code was not something you could cheaply and formally guarantee to have all 3 of these properties. this is why writing hard software is much more difficult and expensive, because depending on the use case, you may only get one chance and so you have to be right from the start. but the vast majority of software we use does not need to be Good Code to provide value to users. in fact, it is very likely that most software we use is not formally verifiable! we accepted some bugs in exchange for velocity and progress, so we rely on tests and o11y instead and have adopted a more incremental approach. this is a good thing! agents help us move faster, and if you're open to the idea, are capable of helping us write better code. it won't be Good Code (that is still expensive), but it is likely to be much better on average at scale. the new craft of swe is to figure out how to do this. it's your job now! if your productivity with and without agents is not significantly different, you're doing something wrong. but it's not too late to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to learn a whole new skill tree

Asking Claude to review your code is a slot machine. Every review finds brand new bugs. Review again: more. Review a tenth time: it still finds something. It never runs out of bugs to find... so how do you decide your code is actually done?

Your next users are machines Agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, up 14x in six months

Bro… you still open websites, add things to your cart, and type in your credit card info just to buy something online? I just text my @bot what I want, and it handles everything. Literally finds it, checks out, places the order, and sends me the receipt. I don’t even open a single website. The future of shopping is having your own AI do it for you. Browsing websites and doing all these things yourself is so… 2025. 🤣

Elon Musk just highlighted another insane Grok Bot capability Grok Bot can now shop for you on the internet, find the best deals and even complete purchases on your behalf You can simply drop a picture of your credit card into the chat, tell Grok what you want to buy, and it will search the internet for the best deal and order it Imagine not having to spend hours searching different websites, comparing prices or going through checkout yourself.... Grok Bot does it for you You just tell Grok Bot what you want, and it handles the shopping for you...a new way to shop

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

🤖 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗮-𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗥𝗦𝗜 uses 𝗥𝗦𝗜 to evolve 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀 through physical task feedback, without updating model parameters. ▶ 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗗𝗼𝗷𝗼: 56.83 avg. score, 50.83% success rate, +𝟮𝟳.𝟴𝟲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘃𝘀. 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗣𝗧-𝟲 𝗔𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 (𝟮𝟴.𝟵𝟳) ▶ 𝗥𝗦𝗜 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗽: Execute → Diagnose → Improve → Validate → Inherit ▶ 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱: Multi-point EEF prediction and Planning + Feedback Subagents This achievement reflects the collective efforts of our joint team. RoboRSI will be 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗼𝗻 at https://github.com/OpenSenseNova/SenseNova-RoboRSI. A comprehensive 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 detailing our methods and findings is also on the way. Stay tuned!