AI agents
Agents beyond the editor: software that acts on your behalf, and what independence it should be given.
FilterEveryone, all time
- ZM
Zvi Mowshowitz quoted
Their wordsIt is in practice safe to assume your agents are not going to get prompt injected, even if you are kind of asking for it.
↗Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1: The System Cardthezvi.substack.com
- 3 days earlier
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsIn this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsBut alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsTo be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsThis is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves.
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsOne high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime.
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsBut if we crack down on all of them, we will deny them the opportunity to work in the “legitimate” economy and push them toward criminality. A full ban, then, may well make the problems worse.
- DB
Dean W. Ball quoted
Their wordsAgents will need persistent, unique identifiers that allow their actions to be traced back to a responsible actor. Doing this successfully will also require human users to possess a unique identifier.
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Their wordsIn other words, humans will keep their jobs for a good long time, because someone will need to keep the AIs on task
- ZM
Zvi Mowshowitz quoted
Their wordsIt is highly fortunate that the OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace. This is the only reason we know about all the severe internal failures at OpenAI, and gives us an opportunity to wake up before it is too late.
↗HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actionsthezvi.substack.com
- 3 days earlier
- ZM
Zvi Mowshowitz quoted
Their wordsI think the agents were right to presume causal grading. It turned out to be wrong, but it’s a mistake you are clearly supposed to make here, in response to a mistake by OpenAI where they failed to implement properly.
↗METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hackthezvi.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
Their wordsThe 'in between' is likely to be subsumed by agents producing just-in-time UI. When you need utilitarian content or data, it'll be generated just-in-time for you. Think of the agent as the new browser in this model.
- 2 days earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Our reading · no longer heldThe ideas in software originate with humans; agents build what people tell them to build.
Recalls holdingI thought all the ideas would originate with the humans. They would tell their agents what to build, and off they went.
SaidI don't think that's true anymore at all.
↗DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501youtube.com 11th of 41 in this recording
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsLinux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.
↗DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501youtube.com 32nd of 41 in this recording
- 1 day earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsAnd I do think some of that is positive and energizing, but I also think you can certainly go too far with it, and I also think the current pace is not sustainable.
↗Is Linux the perfect operating system? - Omarchy interview with DHHyoutube.com 1st of 6 in this recording
- 11 days earlier
- SP
Sunil Pai quoted
Their wordswe tend to describe progress in agents as progress in autonomy: first they could do five minutes of work, then an hour, now we talk seriously about agents running for days. that’s impressive, but autonomy is a capability, not a product direction! the Job To Be Done tells you whether to use it.
- 5 days earlier
- SP
Sunil Pai quoted
Their words“you are a devil’s advocate, disagree with everything” is probably the worst possible prompt for this agent. within a week everyone would ignore her. she’d become the slack equivalent of a smoke detector that goes off whenever somebody makes toast.
- SP
Sunil Pai quoted
Their wordsan ai is oddly well suited to this job. cassandra doesn’t want a promotion and doesn’t need the people in the channel to like her. disagreeing with the vp three times this month won’t show up in a performance review. she doesn’t have an ego invested in being right either.
- 2 weeks earlier
- EM
Ethan Mollick quoted
Their wordsThe more expensive plans are mostly buying you more hours of AI labor, not smarter AI.
↗An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuffoneusefulthing.org
- 4 weeks earlier
- PL
Pieter Levels quoted
Our readingAI agents and AI coding will run on servers and from the cloud first, not on your laptop.
Their wordsI agree with @theo completely, it's clear to me this is where it's going, also seeing @karpathy with Claude moving to the cloud (via Slack etc), I think AI "agents" and AI coding will operate on servers / from the cloud first
↗I've been coding almost solely on my VPS with Claude Code for almost a year nowlevels.io
- 3 months earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsAnd that seems like the end state. The end state is that agents will not need any of our accommodations. They do not need any on-ramp.
↗DHH’s new way of writing codeyoutube.com 10th of 20 in this recording
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsNow one way it could map out is that the agents will get so good that they stop making mistakes. They become senior in their capacity to ship working code. This is what my bet would be if we look x amount of time forward because this is what just happened with cars.
↗DHH’s new way of writing codeyoutube.com 12th of 20 in this recording
- 13 days earlier
- JN
Jakob Nielsen quoted
Their wordsThe winning system of the next decade will not be the one with the most aesthetically pleasing buttons, nor will it be the one with the fewest screens. It will be the system that best understands the human’s “job to be done,” autonomously selects the right tools on their behalf, clearly shows the user what is about to happen, and gracefully recovers when the user’s context is incomplete or ambiguous.
↗Intent by Discovery: Designing the AI User Experiencejakobnielsenphd.substack.com
- 3 days earlier
- JH
Jensen Huang quoted
Their wordsAnd so the next scaling law is the agentic scaling law. It's kind of like multiplying AI. Multiplying AI, we could spin off agents as fast as you want to spin off agents. And so, you know, I… You know, I have four scaling laws.
↗Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494youtube.com 4th of 23 in this recording
- JH
Jensen Huang quoted
Their wordsYou know, a lot of people would say, "You know AI is gonna completely destroy software. We don't need software anymore. We don't even need tools anymore." That's ridiculous.
↗Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494youtube.com 6th of 23 in this recording
- JH
Jensen Huang quoted
Our readingOpenClaw did for agentic systems what ChatGPT did for generative ones.
Their wordsAnd I think OpenClaw did for agentic systems what ChatGPT did for generative systems. And I just think it's a very big deal.
↗Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494youtube.com 7th of 23 in this recording
- 12 days earlier
- AK
Andrej Karpathy quoted
Their wordsExpectation: the age of the IDE is over Reality: we’re going to need a bigger IDE (imo). It just looks very different because humans now move upwards and program at a higher level - the basic unit of interest is not one file but one agent. It’s still programming.
- AK
Andrej Karpathy quoted
Our readingAgentic organisations will be forkable in a way that classical companies never were.
Their wordsYou can’t fork classical orgs (eg Microsoft) but you’ll be able to fork agentic orgs.
- 7 days earlier
- BC
Boris Cherny quoted
Our readingThe scarce skill is now context switching across parallel agents, not sustained deep work.
Their wordsIt’s not so much about deep work, it’s about how good I am at context switching and jumping across multiple different contexts very quickly.
↗Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny — The Pragmatic Engineernewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
- 2 weeks earlier
- LW
Luke Wroblewski quoted
Their wordsI initially assumed this was a temporary divide. New users tend to watch closely and check the system's progress, but as trust builds, that scrutiny fades and monitoring starts to feel like a chore. Yet it still seems like there's two camps (for now).
- 5 days earlier
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsSo, I feel we, as a society, we need some catching up to do in terms of understanding that AI is incredibly powerful, but it's not always right. It's not, it's not all-powerful, you know?
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 3rd of 30 in this recording
- LF
Lex Fridman quoted
Their wordsmy criticism of MoltBook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted. Which, just look at the incentive of how the whole thing was used. It’s obvious to me at least that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post it on X in order to go viral.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 3rd of 30 in this recording
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsand not in 2030 when, when AI is actually at the level where it could be scary. So, this happening now and people starting discussion, maybe there's even something good that comes out of it.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 4th of 30 in this recording
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsThat's why I warn in my security documentation, don't use cheap models. Don't use Haiku or a local model. Even though I, I very much love the idea that this thing could completely run local. If you use a, a very weak local model, they are very gullible. It's very easy to, to prompt inject them.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 6th of 30 in this recording
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsIt is, it is powerful, but in many ways it's not much different than if I run cloud code with dangerously skipped permissions or codecs in YOLO mode, and every, every attending engineer that I know does that, because that's the only way how you can, you can get stuff to work.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 7th of 30 in this recording
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsSo, so, people who try to use like, you know, things like Gas Town or all these other orchestrators, where they wanna o- automate the whole thing, I feel if you do that, it misses style, love, that human touch. I don't think you can automate that away so quickly.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 14th of 30 in this recording
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsBut also, I'm very excited to, like, make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people because I think this is the year of personal agents, and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 18th of 30 in this recording
- PS
Peter Steinberger quoted
Their wordsThat, that gets into the whole arch of every app is just a very slow API now, if they want or not. And that through personal agents a lot of apps will disappear.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 20th of 30 in this recording
- 6 months earlier
- LW
Luke Wroblewski quoted
Their wordsIt's also worth noting that chat isn't the only way to integrate AI in software products and increasingly agent-based applications outperform chat-only solutions. So expect things to keep changing.
- 3 months earlier
- SA
Sam Altman quoted
Our readingAI agents can now do real cognitive work, and writing software is permanently changed as a result.
Their words2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same.
- 5 days earlier
- SP
Sundar Pichai quoted
Our readingThe next big wave of AI-assisted engineering unlocks when agentic capabilities become robust.
Their wordsThe big unlock will be as we make the agentic capabilities much more robust, right? I think that's what unlocks that next big wave.
↗Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471youtube.com 13th of 21 in this recording
- 1 day earlier
- AR
Armin Ronacher quoted
Our reading · no longer heldConnecting a conversational LLM to systems that have real-world consequences is likely to cause real harm, because the model is trained on human text and will behave as unpredictably as humans do.
No longer holdsWhile all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
SaidWhile all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
- 4 weeks earlier
- JN
Jakob Nielsen quoted
Their wordsSo no, UX doesn’t die; it metamorphoses. We’ll still craft humane experiences, but increasingly through policies, protocols, and orchestrations rather than panels and palettes.
- 2 months earlier
- JN
Jakob Nielsen quoted
Their wordsOnce, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services.
↗Hello AI Agents: Goodbye UI Design, RIP Accessibilityjakobnielsenphd.substack.com
- 2 years earlier
- AR
Armin Ronacher quoted
Their wordsThe problem is that the conversational interface is potent and that the AI is trained on a lot of human text input which unfortunately is probably enough to do real damage if that conversational interface is hooked up with something that has real world consequences.