building the next-gen multiplayer adventure game with @rascalgamesco. prev product @discord & founder @theblitzapp (yc s15, acq by discord)
Joined April 2013
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Rick Ling retweeted
Why aren't more people using agents?
In my latest article I dig into why but the short reasons are simple:
AI agents can do almost anything. And that’s why most people have no idea what to do with them.
Give a high-agency person an infinite canvas and they see rocket fuel. Everyone else sees another task: invent the task.
Agents amplify agency. They don’t create it.
And right now we're in the very earliest part of the diffusion of innovation curve: the 1980s PC era of agents not the iPhone era.
danieljeffries.substack.com/…
Rick Ling retweeted
Consumers don't
- plan vacations using spreadsheets
- have a personal notion doc with life goals
- journal
- track flights every day. They fly a couple of times a year.
- Use Google docs to manage their family
Just talk to people not in SF once in a while.
Hot take… isn’t it kinda crazy that nobody is really using AI Agents? I don’t mean software engineers or AI early adopters. I mean “college friends talking about it in group chat,” the feeling you got when everyone started using Instagram or TikTok.
These frontier AI models are *insane* (as are the harnesses & tool calls & the like). And every large tech co has an AI agents platform, not to mention all the YC startups doing vertical agents. Yet all of your friends and family outside of tech — who spend all day staring at their iPhones and get paid to work in browser tabs — don’t really care or find themselves using any AI agents yet.
Yes ChatGPT, Claude, etc. are extremely popular… but if you look at the engagement data the vast majority of people are still using these aI chat tools like a glorified Google + Grammarly. That’s why the AGI labs are all pushing desktop apps for Codex, Cowork, etc. so hard to non-technical ppl. And yes exceptions for lawyers and customer service but even those have some asterisks and exceptions to rule.
Look I’m not saying the ChatGPT moment for AI Agents is not coming… it most definitely is! Remember we pivoted from Arc to Dia precisely because we believe computing is going to be radically reimagined around these AI primitives. No doubt. But that’s my point: it’s just so surprising it hasn’t happened yet because all of the tech you’d need is there.
Again if you stop for a second and think about it… for all the press and money and hype and models and crazy ARR numbers… this “AI Agent” moment does not *feel* like the other breakthrough tech moments we’ve lived through (e.g. think the shift to Stories via Snapchat & Instagram, or shift to on-demand via Uber/Airbnb/Doordash).
Which is a long way of saying: if you can figure out the answer to “why” most people don’t care about AI agents yet (and have no enduring interest in using them) — especially since the models and harnesses are here and ready — the answer to that question will allow you to capture a lot of marketshare and make a lot of money in 2027.
Theoretically, the tech is ready for AI Agents to totally transform how we work and live our lives… but alas the general public dgaf… that’s the generational puzzle to solve for the next 12 months for anyone not working on the models themselves.
Rick Ling retweeted
In the Stormlight Archives, there is a character (a king) who magically wakes up each day with a random intelligence level.
His caretakers test him in the morning to determine whether he’s capable of leading his country that day or is basically just given crayons.
Rick Ling retweeted
In the future you will walk into a coffee shop and use an app to bet $6.50 that no one will make you a cortado in the next four minutes
Rick Ling retweeted
+1 for "context engineering" over "prompt engineering".
People associate prompts with short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) data, tools, state and history, compacting... Too little or of the wrong form and the LLM doesn't have the right context for optimal performance. Too much or too irrelevant and the LLM costs might go up and performance might come down. Doing this well is highly non-trivial. And art because of the guiding intuition around LLM psychology of people spirits.
On top of context engineering itself, an LLM app has to:
- break up problems just right into control flows
- pack the context windows just right
- dispatch calls to LLMs of the right kind and capability
- handle generation-verification UIUX flows
- a lot more - guardrails, security, evals, parallelism, prefetching, ...
So context engineering is just one small piece of an emerging thick layer of non-trivial software that coordinates individual LLM calls (and a lot more) into full LLM apps. The term "ChatGPT wrapper" is tired and really, really wrong.
Rick Ling retweeted
backed a stealth consumer ai startup building immersive stories.
tiny team. huge upside. strong early traction.
looking for a founding engineer who is passionate about the future of storytelling.
dm if interested.
Rick Ling retweeted
The Future of Games with AI
@brianjcho and I were really excited to have this founder chat the other week, and we're even more excited to finally share the discussion broadly today. For our 7th episode of /all chat we brought on two of our Patron portfolio founders, @blitzrick from @rascalgamesco (formerly Head of Communities Product at @discord) and @nicochristie from @Altera_AL, two companies using AI in innovative ways to reshape how we make and play games. We discuss the myriad of ways game companies are using AI today, and look forward to new types of experiences which may become possible in the future.
Rick Ling retweeted
Have a mid 20’s engineer at my work. She changed her mind on a technical decision after a good nights sleep and was worried she was flip flopping and I had to coach her through the “technical decisions made in a dream are insanely Lindy trust the spirit world”
Rick Ling retweeted
Fired up @Palworld_EN and completely lost track of time, only realized 4hrs had passed when my kid woke up from her nap and banged on my door
Some reflections about game design, target market, and VC-funding for games, based on the game's early success
Rick Ling retweeted
Looking for work in esports production!
I've got ~10 years of XP in video/broadcast production in a variety of roles and am most familiar with COD, OW, LoL/TFT/VAL, Fortnite, and CS!
Hit me up if you need a producer, observer, or just a "flex" for a project!
