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Signals and Threads · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Minsky describes how a small web app that takes an agent 30 seconds as a single HTML file takes about 10 minutes inside his firm's internal build and code review tooling. His conclusion is to pre-build deterministic setup so the agent doesn't have to relearn the tools every time.
…is our code review system that has to be created and a build process that has to be kicked off and there's just like more steps and tool calls and the thing that actually represents there's like 30 seconds of like actual work yeah to go and like generate the code you probably want to grab like
the bonsai starter template and like get your code and off to a good start and
so like the whole thing in reality takes 10 minutes what it would have taken 30 seconds in the pure index.html world and i think at first we were like oh maybe this just like the cost we're paying because of like internal languages and libraries like no actually this is maybe stuff that we can fix by exactly as you're suggesting doing like more like hard deterministic setup stuff so that like things are just there and ready and like the agent doesn't have to go and discover again how to use all the tools that's again the kind of like the the agents are kind of like amazing and one of their thing that makes them amazing is also one of the deficiencies which is they are perpetual beginners right they never learn how to use the tools right it's just they rediscover every time how to use the tools and so you kind of have to build your whole system around them being these kind of perpetual beginners
right yeah i think another part of this is you can maybe like instill them with a little bit of repeated knowledge by like writing skills right but then there's a question uh so skills for anyone that doesn't know are these like little documents that you write to kind of guide the model on things…
yeah actually we've talked a little bit about things like skills we talked about function calling there's like we built our own apis for it there's apis like mcp which have come out in the outside world like which became public and popular after we'd already built our own version of it skills is…
nice part about having our own tools right is that we can like if we see a need for something we can go make it um but then there's also this thing you have to do sometimes of being like okay well the outside world has really kind of set their standard against this for example skills and like…