“I set up my 15, what I call the faceless toaster bots. I set up my email bot and then my CEO bot to manage them. I'm like, you're just larping as a CEO. You're just cosplaying. You're not actually doing anything. … Well, I'm getting the agents to talk to themselves. But what are they talking about? Why do they need to talk? Isn't that the same model underneath?”
The TWIML AI Podcast · AI Builders · October 2026
Context
Jeffries was arguing that much of today's agent work is setup rather than real work. He compared it to an essay about the Japanese kanna, a beautiful hand plane where the setup is the point: viral demos are 90% configuring agents, and the part where they do real work never happens.
Transcript
…that's almost right. Hold on a second. Yeah, that's good. We'll just tweak this and this. But you don't know which of those you're going to get in the slot machine. Right. And, you know, and that, and so there's this weird management era. And then certain things just don't work. Like computers. I
…of things but uh you know those things break all the time or like you end up finding the corner cases and like you need to you know go back into this code like i agree with your point about um kind of this management and delegation era and how it allows you to kind of expand your plate and do more
yeah and i i so i had a best friend who's a pretty good tech guy coming to me and it's like i want to know what to do with agents how do i get started and i'm like the question is nonsensical to me as a person who is like in that two percentage like weird high agency semi-autistic kind of people right who is like you know and i'm like i don't understand what do you mean how do you get started like you talk to it and then when it messes up you talk to it again and you figure out what's wrong you critical think and whatever but there's like a lot of people are like well i just want to i want the i want the template right i want the thing that tells me how to do the thing or whatever and so i would say it's just not it's not there yet it's not in the like you know it just hasn't gotten to that phase and so you spend a lot of time just trying to get the agent do what you want there was a great essay about it called two shaped objects okay and they talked about a favorite a famous japanese craftsman wood planer called a kana it's a huge piece of work of art takes multiple craftsmen months to make and set up for you and all this stuff and when you…
so the last time we spoke was end of 2024 you were working on computer use agents that's that was a great conversation i'll refer folks back to it uh but you know talk a little bit about you know what you've been up to since then how you've evolved the way you're thinking about uh what you're doing…
yeah so i'm still trying to solve gaming computer use i don't think that it's solved i think i've seen a lot of tweets otherwise that promise me it's solved and it's not okay like jev is still not a visual model jev doesn't always make great decisions so that means you've got to translate the…
her as in the movie.
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