“If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, fast forward two years, you're going to have 100,000 agents in your organization. So every human has to become a manager of agents. And that's a big transition for people who have never done managerial work before.”
The Changelog · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Cohen, who builds agent software for companies, explaining why his agents can review code and recommend a merge but the merge itself goes through under a person's credentials. He wants people to stay at the centre, and thinks organisations that teach everyone to direct and review agents will be able to keep their staff, while those that don't will end up with mass layoffs.
Transcript
…to an agent. And I don't think. Think we have the mechanism fully in place yet for that. But there are some great companies and projects, like one of the ones we partnered with, which is called OneCLI, and they are building that identity for agents so that you can express those kinds of concepts.
…in this policy-driven world that is inside of NanoClaw, if I understand correctly, that you don't want an agent to merge the code. You want a human to approve it, and the merge is accredited to that person and their credential versus the agent who, in quotes, actually did the work. Is that right?
…the way we're building it. When we're bringing it to companies, it's the same approach. We're saying we're going to give each person in your team an agent, an assistant that's going to help them, help the person do their work, going to make them more effective, two, three times more effective. And the people in your team need to become managers of agents. Like that's where the world is going. If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, fast forward two years, you're going to have 100,000 agents in your organization. So every human has to become a manager of agents. And that's a big transition for people who have never done managerial work before. They have to learn a lot of new skills, like clearly communicating what they want and what their intent is, giving feedback, taking responsibility, reviewing other work of other people, or in this case, other agents. So it's a whole new skill set. And the way we're approaching it is the starting point is give each person an agent where it's one-to-one. They take responsibility for it. They give…
I guess it makes sense too that NanoClaw is not a developer tool to create more software. It is more of a business-focused tool to, as you said before, amplify humans' output, which makes more sense because when you think about agents and loops, I'm a developer. I naturally think about how's it…
So the first thing is, like you're saying, it's business critical. In some ways, the agents become the whole company. It's kind of their workforce. And for any kind of large company, that has to be in their cloud environment, right? In their AWS account or GCP or Azure. And starting to speak to…
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. So how and everything you're doing is built on the open source version of NanoClaw, or do you have a separate repository that you deploy into enterprises? Or what's the take there? A separate or same?
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