Masad had just described an all-in-one agent that connects his calendar, chat history, GitHub and Salesforce and links things across them. Atallah took the other side: a universal agent lets you understand less of your own business without anyone picking up the accountability. He went on to argue for narrowly focused agents that can each be held to one area.
Yeah, I mean, I built something on Replit like a long time ago. I started as like a sort of a CRM agent initially. That was the main problem that I had. But slowly, like, we added features to it and it's sort of like doing more and more things. But what's what's really interesting is that the more I connected Replit to my all my stuff, it sort of like started answering all the things for me. Um, and so increasingly, like the platform itself is like subsuming these sort of like these domain-specific agents that I built. I do think that there is some, in some ways, you want something that is sometimes like focused on one particular thing and you don't want it to be able to do everything. On the other hand, once you have your entire company's context in one place, it's really cool to join across totally different domains. Like when I ask it a question, it can like look at my sort of personal chat history, join it across the GitHub repo across Salesforce. And so it says, like, it will link like random things. It's like, oh, you met this guy like a year ago at a conference. I see it on your calendar. And by the way, someone else from their team is in discussion with your sales team and it creates all these different synergies. And when I go into a meeting, I like I, you know, I've connected a lot of different threads and I'm making much more progress on a deal or something like that. So this is where it's sort of trending now.
Well,
I think I'm like a little bit, I'll take the counter on that. I think that the worst part about doing cross-domain joins with your personal agent is that the more work you give it to do, the more understanding of what's going on you're sacrificing. And yet, no one new is taking responsibility for that sacrifice understand it. Like agents don't have any responsibility. You can't like if there's a fixed level of cortisol that the whole company can tolerate between everybody, you know, you like you, you like, I want to be like less stressed about some area if I'm going to be like sacrificing my understanding of it. Someone else needs to take the cord. But the agent doesn't take on any of that responsibility. And then a universal agent that's doing all things, I can't adjust how much understanding I'm sacrificing in all the different things. It points me a little bit towards maybe down the road, the sub-agents that people use will be very vertically focused. Maybe we have a chief of staff type agent that coordinates between them. But I feel like you do need vertically focused agents where you're like, okay, this agent is more responsible psychologically for these things. And I want quality checks that make sure it's doing those things correctly. And it doesn't need to focus on anything else. It just has one focus area. I wonder if that's going to help people at least get a weird loose sense of responsibility on top of agents.
Fascinating. So you're saying general agents create a tragedy of commons of sorts.
Kind of. I have a general agent that every day looks for things that need me and tries to figure out what to do. And it's just like impossible to improve this agent. Like it's like every time I try to make an improvement, I end up like ignoring its output about a week later. It just feels like it doesn't really care about any of the specific things it's diving into. And kind of imagine having a chief of staff where they're very good at drafting all of your replies across the whole organization. And then compare that to something where you have like 10 chiefs of staff, each as competent as that one chief of staff, but they're all responsible for like individual sectors of what makes up your life. Like the latter, I feel like gives you a way of tuning how much understanding you sacrifice compared to the gain you get from like basically I can like lean in more to the areas where the agent is failing for some areas and then have agents with very good competency like take over my understanding of other of other parts of my life
yeah interesting it's it's sort of like uh almost rediscovering you know um specialization right well what's his name the the like the famous uh economist uh adam um adam smith like with a pencil kind of thing where yeah that was like a huge realization for humanity that like specialization specialist special specialization is actually good the problem is like we kind of like over specialized as like a civilization and i think over specialization is is um is oppressive in its its own ways i mean i think we've you know um sort of like you know there's the marxist theory of alienation right the the idea is um uh because of over special uh uh you know people are doing just focus on one thing uh they they do not see the fruits of the labor they don't actually know what their impact is on the larger organization or the product they're producing and therefore they actually kind of feel depressed and detached and and you're kind of acting like a machine and you're not actually fully fully human and so maybe there's like a bit of a reaction to that and and and i think with our agents we're like oh that there should be like one god god agent but in fact specialization is actually like really good for machines and that's like the the point that you're making and like humans should be general but like machines should be ultimately a lot more specialized