Houseware

My YouTube feed is full of thumbnails saying “You won’t believe what this Agent can do”, “Shocking Llama 3 gets us closer to AGI”, etc. Perfect style transfer from the Mr.Beast clickbait playbook, but doesn’t speak to the reality of where we stand. Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I recently wrote a memo to my team at @gethouseware , and asked them “Do agents feel magical yet?” Heard back a resounding “NOT YET!” There’s a lot to be excited about, but there’s a lot that’s yet to be built. Robustness is yet to be cracked, especially when you start getting into automating business processes. Langgraph and DSPy get us closer, but there’s still an abstraction layer that need to be baked in to improve Dev Experience. Here’s how I’m thinking: DSPy’s concept of signatures in the Chain-of-Thought module solves for brittleness in prompting, but more importantly, it abstracts away the stupid prompt engineering that I had to do earlier. The agent toolkit needs a similar abstraction. I don’t want to be creating twenty-five nodes, and land myself in a tangled mess of edges. There’s the other extreme too: CrewAI oversimplified it, and took away too much control. Building agents should be simpler! Let's talk about costs lol. Came across a tweet from @jaredpalmer over the weekend, "When it comes to agents, running the current frontier models in a loop is comical at current price points. It’s ngmi. At minimum, new middleware is going to be needed to properly select model size for the task(s) at hand, queue + batch process, and efficiently pass around state, files, and memory." ^^100%. Looking at the OpenAI bills on our end, extrapolating this pattern for production use cases in enterprises doesn’t make any sense right now! Figuring this out. We’re building out end-user facing agents, and learning which patterns work best for which use cases. Eventually, the right abstractions will show up. Stare at the agents, and the abstractions stare back?

👉 Bangalore peeps, head over to the best Product Huddle in town, this Thursday! 👈