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This is f*cking insane. SpaceXAI engineer Lauren Tan: "99% of people use only a fraction of GrokBot

kaivectorf

kaivectorf

@kaivectorf

November 10, 2026· 54:07

This is f*cking insane. SpaceXAI engineer Lauren Tan: "99% of people use only a fraction of GrokBot's potential They run one GrokBot agent without /loops + /graphs + /harness I run an autonomous team of 100+ GrokBot agents - a Chief of Staff, a PM, and specialized workers That’s the new engineering stack" GrokBot → Chief of Staff → PM → Specialized Workers → Autonomous Agent Team In a 50-minute workshop, Lauren shows how to build a powerful agent team from scratch Single Agent → Loops → Graphs → Autonomous Fleet Worth more than most $1,500 agentic engineering courses Bookmark and watch it today Then read the GrokBot engineering guide below to build your own GrokBot team ↓

Transcript

0:01
personally, I think that, the best use of you
0:06
of AI is really is like a
0:08
like a pair, like someone you're pair programming with
0:11
and not someone as
0:12
not, not a
0:12
not a tool to just replace the act of writing code
0:15
or worse, outsourcing your thinking
0:19
And I think there's a tendency
0:20
like, you know, because AI is so exciting
0:22
you wanna put
0:23
AI everywhere and be seen as someone who's very
0:26
you know, what do you call it
0:28
like, on the ball, I guess, with, with AI, that you feel this pressure of
0:34
like, you know, I'm just gonna, I gotta increase my productivity
0:37
I gotta ship, like, a hundred PRs this week
0:39
and barely understand what I'm doing
0:41
and, you know, vibe code my way to a
0:44
a million ARR or whatever
0:48
but I think You know
0:51
one of the things that I've personally seen
0:53
is that although when I use AI
0:55
I save some time
0:56
you know, writing the code
0:58
I actually find myself spending
0:59
more time reviewing what the AI did and
1:02
like, correcting it
1:03
So, you know, like, I've, I've tried the
1:05
the thing that a lot of people say
1:06
like, you know, you
1:08
instead of prompting an AI to just build the feature outright
1:11
you sort of get it to
1:13
build a spec for you first
1:15
then you review that spec
1:17
and then you do that whole thing
1:18
Then it's like... Okay
1:19
so I assume you can see my screen?
1:21
Yes, yeah, we're good
1:23
So yeah, today, yeah, I think
1:25
I think the big theme for me
1:26
as I've been using agents to write code
1:29
and I'm sure a lot of you have
1:30
had the same experience as well
1:31
is how do you trust it?
1:33
You know
1:34
especially if you are an engineer that's been
1:37
writing code for a very long time
1:38
you have
1:39
a lot of
1:40
opinions and lessons that you've learned about doing
1:43
good engineering
1:45
And when you see agents just
1:46
you know, winging it and, you know, guessing, hallucinating, you know
1:51
confidently stating that they found the smoking gun
1:54
for the hundredth time
1:56
but it's actually not the real problem
1:58
you lose a lot of trust
1:59
And when you lose
2:00
when you don't have much trust in your agents
2:03
I feel like you
2:04
you really can't get the most out of
2:05
them
2:06
And for me, the parallels like with management
2:10
so if I'm an
2:11
a manager, an engineering manager of a team
2:13
and I have a bunch of
2:15
you know, I have a team of engineers
2:17
on my team, and I don't trust them
2:20
then
2:20
the mode of operation I'm going to be
2:22
in is going to be like micromanagement
2:24
right? I'll have to
2:25
spend a lot of time
2:26
looking over my report's shoulders and
2:29
checking that they're doing their work well
2:31
you know
2:31
that they're not shipping bugs to production
2:35
And so I drew this chart because
2:38
it's not, it's not a very scientific chart
2:40
but like this is how I imagine
2:43
myself and my journey through using agents
2:46
So, you know, like fast forward or back forward
2:51
or fast back, fast backwards, like a year or so when
2:56
you know, nobody was
2:57
or not many people were using agents to code
3:00
I think you
3:02
you get into this mode where you are
3:06
In very heavily in the loop with one or several
3:09
like a handful of agents
3:11
and you find yourself just constantly
3:14
you know, trying to understand what your agents are doing
3:17
and you're very, very in the loop
3:18
You're watching every single output
3:20
You are sitting there prompting
3:23
and you really can't parallelize beyond that because you don't
3:27
again, you don't have that trust
3:28
right? You can't go to a hundred agents
3:31
like swan a hundred agents when you don't
3:33
even trust the output of one agent
3:36
So over the past five months
3:38
I feel like I've really been able to
3:41
like ascend this
3:43
Trust curve, and now I'm at the point where
3:47
I actually have, this sounds kind of scary to say this
3:49
and it makes me sound like a slop artist
3:51
but I, I promise I'm not
3:53
But I actually have my agents now
3:55
auto-merging PRs for me
3:58
which is like a wild thing to say
3:59
but
4:01
like I woke up today
4:02
and there were like 20 PRs landed
4:04
and I just reviewed them on main
4:06
like they were already landed
4:08
and they were good
4:09
so how did I get to that point?
4:11
It's basically what I wanted to talk about today
4:15
and again, like, yeah
4:16
feel free to jump in if you have questions
4:18
Colin
4:20
but, oh yeah, of course, I got to show this
4:24
this chart, where
4:28
Don't, don't do that
4:30
Trust, someone requested to control my computer
4:33
probably won't do that
4:35
but yeah, so this chart, I think, I, I
4:39
I'm sharing this chart not to kind of like flex
4:41
but to kind of show like the journey
4:43
Like, so you can see like the curve
4:45
like it sort of like inversely matches
4:47
the
4:48
contributions I've been able to land at Cursor
4:51
So I joined five months ago
4:52
and five months ago
4:53
like I, you know, my first month
4:55
I was like not very productive because I was
4:57
you know, I was learning the code base
4:59
didn't know what the heck was going on
5:01
And as I got more confident in
5:04
in my agents
5:05
I've really been able to kind of ramp
5:07
up my productivity
5:09
and again, like, yeah
5:10
like last month I shipped a thousand PRs
5:13
which is ridiculous
5:15
and then this month
5:16
we're only on the 12th
5:17
I'm already at like almost 800 PRs landed
5:22
so the velocity is definitely high
5:25
and you, you
5:26
I'm
5:26
sure a lot of you will definitely be questioning like how
5:28
how much of this code is actually good
5:31
and I think, yeah, like that's definitely fair to question
5:35
but, yeah, I think
5:38
I think if you set up your agents well
5:42
you can definitely get to
5:43
a very similar level
5:46
and so I'm going to talk about how
5:47
we do that
5:51
so for me, I think, I'm curious, like, I guess, Colin, your experience as well
5:55
but, for me
5:57
I think the most important skill
6:00
that you should have in your toolbox
6:03
when you work with agents is verification
6:06
and by verification
6:06
I mean
6:07
the ability for an agent to actually run the code
6:12
or take CPU traces or heap snapshots or
6:17
you know, open an iOS simulator
6:19
whatever, you know, however your application is exposed to your users
6:24
it can do the same thing and
6:27
run it for real
6:28
and actually test and verify it will work
6:31
Because that's the thing that really
6:33
closes the loop
6:35
it doesn't guarantee your agent writes good code
6:38
but it allows them to at least write correct code
6:42
which is a big
6:42
a really big step forward for
6:44
being able to trust your agents
6:48
I will, I can share one example that we have
6:52
within Cursor
6:56
oops, where, let me open this
7:00
Let me, make my full screen
7:07
There you go
7:12
so for the, for Cursor's agent window
7:16
so this is actually an interesting story
7:18
when I joined Cursor five months ago
7:22
they're actually, well
7:24
I was supposed to join a different team
7:25
I was supposed to join
7:26
like, the cloud agents team
7:28
but then since I have a lot of
7:29
experience working on React
7:32
and agents window is a React application
7:35
I was
7:37
I was asked to basically help out with
7:40
the agent window work
7:43
but
7:45
there wasn't really a lot of
7:46
like, skills to help me
7:48
So I just found myself like
7:49
okay, agent window's gonna launch in
7:51
like, a week, right? We have a really tight deadline
7:54
and, there was, you know, I was just sitting there like
7:58
okay, I'm gonna open up the performant
8:00
the, the Chrome DevTools and just
8:02
like, take a trace, look at it myself
8:04
and try to make sense of this flame
8:05
graph
8:06
And keep in mind
8:07
I was just, like, in my first week
8:09
so I had no idea what I was looking at
8:10
no idea what, you know, I mean, I had some idea
8:12
but, you know, the
8:13
the code base was completely fresh to me
8:16
and I realized, like, my agent had no idea either
8:20
you know, like, I would take a screenshot of the trail
8:21
download trace, or send it to it
8:22
and it'd be like
8:23
yeah, it kinda looks like this
8:25
you know
8:26
and it would, like, confidently state, like, it's this thing
8:29
and then I'd try to fix that
8:30
and turns out that's not the actual thing
8:33
So this was a very
8:34
very slow process
8:35
And if you've ever done any like performance work yourself or
8:38
you know
8:39
just even
8:39
development with an agent where you don't have a verification skill
8:43
you are the verifier
8:45
right? You've, you're the bottleneck
8:46
You, you
8:47
you tell your agent to do something
8:49
and then it goes off and writes some
8:50
code
8:50
Then you open up your
8:51
you know, local dev build and then you start to say
8:54
oh, you know, it doesn't work
8:55
Then you got to copy paste screen
8:56
you know, screenshots or console errors or whatever
9:00
and then your agent like slowly kind of like
9:03
you know
9:03
works with that and then tries to understand it and
9:08
fix the thing
9:09
But then you're constantly just in the loop and
9:11
and being a bottleneck. So there's really no
9:13
way to parallelize
9:14
So the control glass skills are like one
9:16
of the first skills I built
9:18
for cursor
9:20
and glass, by the way
9:20
is the code name for agent's window that we use internally
9:23
but it's just Pressure
9:26
I guess
9:28
and so this skill
9:29
is, I guess that
9:30
that the code itself is not super interesting
9:33
Your agent can very easily make one for you
9:35
where if
9:36
if you're building an electron app or a
9:38
web app or even iOS
9:41
applications, you can teach your agent how to use
9:44
like, the Chrome DevTools protocol or through
9:48
Apple has some
9:50
utilities as well for running the simulator and
9:52
taking traces and controlling programmatic control as well
9:57
so that's really useful
10:00
but one thing I actually want to talk about is
10:03
the, this thing
10:07
or you have to read me
10:09
so this skill comes with this very unique feature called
10:13
or not feature
10:14
unique file called a feature map
10:17
And so the story then is like
10:19
I built this skill
10:20
and so now the agent was able to
10:23
actually run
10:24
the agent window and take traces and whatnot
10:28
but it had no idea what
10:30
what the agent's window was
10:31
So, you know, like someone would say like
10:34
oh, the
10:35
the left sidebar is like laggy or something like that
10:39
Or, you know, the right side, the
10:41
the PR tab is not working
10:42
And the agent would just be like kind
10:44
of flailing around. It would spend a lot
10:45
of time trying to like look up the code and
10:47
you know, where is this feature?
10:48
How do I actually get to it
10:50
on the UI?
10:51
Which made it basically completely useless
10:54
you know, like we would, I would run To scale locally
10:58
and, you know, it would spawn a dev build
11:01
but then it'd just be churning
11:03
like, I'd just try to click here
11:04
It, it wouldn't know how to get to things
11:07
and it was just an awful experience
11:09
so, who is putting arrows on my screen?
11:13
so, Yeah, this, this feature map has been really useful
11:18
because it teaches the agent how to get
11:20
to all of the features that you have
11:23
and in PSAC, the plugin that I
11:26
I've made, if you search for PSAC cursor on Google
11:30
you'll, you'll find it
11:32
but there is a create verification skill in that plugin
11:35
where it actually helps you
11:37
set up something like this for yourself
11:39
including the feature map. So it will actually
11:41
explore the code
11:42
and build up this initial feature map
11:44
that tells your agent
11:45
how to get to
11:46
all of the different features that you have
11:49
and this is extremely powerful because
11:51
now that you have these user reports that come in
11:54
you
11:55
you can actually map
11:56
even like a vague report
11:58
or even a screenshot
11:59
So we have this
12:01
internally at Cursor, where, we have a Slack channel with
12:05
you know
12:05
lots of
12:06
people giving us feedback on the agents window
12:08
and Rockbot and whatnot
12:11
and oftentimes the report is very bad
12:14
like very low quality. Like someone will just put
12:16
very often we get like a screenshot
12:18
like, and then someone just says
12:19
question mark, question mark, question mark, like, what is this?
12:22
And, you know, like, without this, your agents are like
12:24
I have no clue
12:26
right? But with a feature map like this
12:28
it has a lot more
12:30
context and understanding of how to actually navigate
12:34
how to get to all the different features
12:36
so like, you know, example, like, I guess, like the sidebar, like
12:39
what is the sidebar?
12:41
you know
12:41
like all the different sub features
12:42
that are present in it
12:45
like from the user point of view
12:47
here's where to, how to get to it
12:48
all the different keyboard shortcuts
12:51
even like the, the
12:53
what do you call it?
12:54
The DOM elements or yeah
12:56
like the attributes that you use for selecting
12:58
things through the CDP
13:01
are all there
13:02
So, again, yeah, this is like really
13:05
really powerful, for, for agents
13:09
and a P stack ships
13:10
that create verification skill
13:12
but also a maintain verification skill
13:15
so you can keep this up to date
13:17
Cool. Yeah. I was just going to ask
13:18
how you created that. So do you mind
13:19
sharing a little bit more about
13:22
that
13:22
that process in the context of P stack
13:23
and maybe just what P stack is for
13:24
the folks who aren't familiar?
13:27
Yeah, so PStack is pretty interesting because
13:30
well, first of all, the name is kind of goofy
13:32
Like, the P, the P in PStack is like potato
13:36
potato stack, because I, so, there is a pretty
13:43
famous person, Gary Tan, who is the CEO of Y Combinator
13:47
and he's come up with this plugin called GStack
13:51
GaryStack, and, funnily enough, we share the last name
13:55
we have no relation
13:56
but I thought it'd be funny to kind of
13:58
you know
13:59
poke fun at Gary and make PStack my version of
14:02
of, of, of his plugin
14:05
but kind of just tailor it to
14:06
my own set of prac
14:08
engineering practices
14:11
but I honestly actually never set out to
14:12
build PStack
14:14
it just started with a bunch of skills
14:16
right? Like, I started with that control glass skill
14:18
and then I started with another skill
14:20
like, called HAL, which I also noticed through
14:23
like, observing agents
14:26
so Like, you know, in the early days of me
14:28
you know, trying to climb this ladder
14:29
I was like super in the loop
14:30
and I was
14:32
basically nitpicking my agents to an extreme degree
14:35
I was like, I would tell it
14:38
you know, this feature has stopped working
14:39
Here's a bug report
14:41
Like, why isn't it working?
14:44
And very often, the agent would just like confidently state like
14:47
"Oh, it has to be this
14:48
right? It has to be this thing."
14:50
And I noticed like when I looked at
14:52
the actual tool calls
14:54
I noticed it wasn't actually reading the code
14:56
that I thought should be affected
14:59
And that made me just extremely suspicious
15:01
And at that point
15:01
I was just like
15:02
I'm not gonna
15:02
I can't trust any this agent anymore because it's just
15:05
it's just completely hallucinating
15:07
And I think I think it's very easy to just
15:11
you know, like build up that distrust and not
15:14
and kind of feel helpless
15:16
like, you know
15:16
you don't know how to help your agents succeed
15:19
But like, again, I think the, the
15:21
the management analogy is super helpful because like
15:23
imagine if you were a manager of an
15:25
engineering team
15:26
and you had
15:27
an engineer on your team who was a really good coder
15:30
no business contacts whatsoever
15:31
you know, they, they just, you just hired them and they
15:34
they onboarded, you know, like five seconds ago
15:38
and so how do you actually teach that
15:40
person to be effective?
15:42
So how you do that is through a
15:43
skill
15:44
a skill being just
15:45
you know, it's just marked down
15:46
right? But, you know, and, and codes a lot of information
15:49
instructions, a lot of
15:52
you can really draw out
15:53
a lot of Intelligence from an agent by
15:57
well, some people on Twitter call it like
15:59
you know, pull the agent to a different latent space
16:02
which is kind of like a fancy way of just saying
16:04
like since, you know, LLMs are sort of like
16:06
they predict the next token
16:09
when you give it some high quality tokens
16:11
to begin with, then, you know, it
16:13
it can kind of pattern match on
16:15
like a higher space that's
16:17
you know, smarter
16:19
so that's like a very interesting model there
16:23
But yeah, I built Peaceback very
16:24
very incrementally
16:26
so, started with just really observing how agents
16:30
you know, all the fail, different failure modes of
16:32
of that agents were having
16:34
And every time I saw that
16:35
I just, okay
16:35
I'm just going to make that a skill
16:37
Right, like stop hallucinating, actually go and search up
16:40
look up the code
16:42
use a lot of sub-agents
16:44
and yeah, stop guessing
16:49
Yeah, that makes sense. One
16:50
one kind of follow-up question here
16:51
both from myself and from a bunch of
16:52
people in the chat. So
16:54
I guess it's two
16:55
two parts. So, one is like
16:56
how do you maintain these skills?
16:57
So, like the product changes over time
16:59
Obviously
16:59
there's a lot of people who should be
17:00
against the code base
17:01
So, how do these skills get maintained?
17:03
and then second to that is like
17:05
how do you know when your verification is
17:07
is good enough?
17:08
like in, you know
17:09
you can trust that the
17:10
verification loops that you've built are gonna
17:13
I guess you trust that the outputs
17:14
when, when they're done
17:18
yeah, maybe I'll talk about
17:21
I think I have somewhat really
17:22
maybe I'll start with this one first
17:24
So, like, how do I maintain these skills?
17:29
So, if you're not familiar with this concept
17:32
an eval is essentially like a way to
17:35
well, I think the mental model I have is like
17:37
it's like a unit test for an agent
17:40
and, you can actually make your own evals
17:43
You don't need like a special framework for
17:45
them
17:45
You can build, you can
17:46
you can build one depending on like
17:48
you know
17:49
how
17:49
scientific and how rigorous you want to be
17:53
my screen is red
17:55
Yeah, there's a little button
17:56
sorry
17:57
Oh, am I like disabling the drawing or something?
18:00
I, I can't see my screen
18:01
Yeah, sorry. If you guys could not draw on the screen
18:03
that'd be great, but, there's a little button in the
18:06
yeah, the, the little drop down
18:10
yeah
18:12
Okay, yeah. You got it
18:14
perfect
18:15
Good to know
18:17
Yeah, so evals are a way to unit test your skills
18:21
basically
18:22
And actually, in P-Stack, we ship
18:24
under potato mode, there's a playbook, if you search for it
18:27
called eval playbook
18:29
and it's
18:31
it's like not, it's actually pretty
18:34
pretty rigorous, the way it's done
18:36
but
18:37
essentially what I do
18:38
is I spawn a lot of different sub-agents
18:41
I have, like, my main coordinator agent
18:44
come up with a rubric for
18:47
what I want the skill to do
18:50
And then it spawns all these sub-agents
18:51
and it, it creates individual directories for them
18:56
which are cleverly named to not
18:58
let the sub-agent know that it's being evaluated
19:01
because, agents can actually tell
19:04
and when they do
19:05
they change their behavior
19:07
but it does a bunch of stuff like that to
19:11
essentially, yeah
19:12
like test whether or not the skill
19:14
I'm making or changing is actually doing
19:16
what I think it does
19:18
and one of the really nice things about
19:20
Cursor is that we are
19:21
we, we support so many different models
19:24
so
19:24
you can actually eval your skill across all
19:26
sorts of different models
19:29
and, you know
19:29
get a sense of how well it performs
19:31
across that different matrix
19:34
especially for the models that you use
19:38
so I do this a lot
19:39
Every time I, I modify a skill
19:40
I will run one of these
19:42
like the email playbook
19:44
and make sure that
19:45
you know
19:46
it's actually leading to a result I want
19:49
but I will say
19:50
like, maintaining skills is actually pretty hard
19:54
it requires, I think
19:55
a lot of taste and observation
19:58
So you kind of need to
20:00
be very good at being a backseat driver
20:02
You know what I mean?
20:03
Like, if you do pair
20:04
if you've ever done pair programming
20:05
for example, and you watch a coworker code
20:08
and you just like
20:09
you, you could probably do this better
20:10
You know, you could do, you know
20:11
like, why did you not do this
20:13
right? You, you ask a lot of questions to your coworker
20:15
and it's kind of a similar thing here
20:17
Like
20:17
you don't want to just be a passive
20:19
observer of the agent. You want to be
20:20
very
20:21
in the driver's seat in the initial stages
20:23
when you're building up your own set of skills
20:26
you know, obviously you can use something like GSAT
20:28
but if you're building your own set of skills
20:30
it's very, I think, you know, opening up the
20:33
all the tool calls and like reading the
20:34
code and Reading all the
20:37
the agent behavior and their thinking blocks
20:40
is a really great way to see where they
20:43
they fail, right? Like what, what
20:46
you know, where are they being done?
20:47
And then you can go and build a
20:48
skill for that
20:50
And then with verification
20:51
how you trust it is
20:53
it's, I think it's also a very similar iteration loop
20:56
where, you know
20:56
like I actually did the same process for
20:59
verifying the verification skill
21:01
where I actually get
21:04
So one thing that's interesting about evals is
21:06
that you can sort of hill climb them
21:08
meaning that, your eval can produce a score
21:12
right?
21:12
a score that you can get your coordinator to produce
21:16
but also
21:17
you can have a judge agent of a different model to
21:21
kind of
21:22
cross-reference and make sure that the
21:24
first model is not being biased
21:26
right? The model that's judging all of the
21:28
sub-agents that are running the thing
21:30
but you can also
21:30
like, hill climb, so meaning that you can
21:33
you can use, like, slash loop in cursor
21:36
and you can say
21:36
okay, keep looping on this eval
21:39
right, until everything is ten out of ten
21:41
as an example
21:43
and I did the same
21:44
the basically the same approach with the control skill
21:46
and so I kind of
21:47
it was very, it was very hands-off
21:48
actually
21:49
so, you know, I, I kind of built
21:52
I built that skill that way
21:53
like the CLI in that skill
21:56
and over time, it's gotten really good
21:59
but yeah
22:00
it was definitely not super smooth
22:02
at the beginning. It required a lot of
22:04
iteration
22:05
And I think there's an analogy here for me
22:08
which is, well
22:10
I make this analogy later in a different
22:12
slide on my drawing here
22:14
but I think of it like
22:17
you know, as a, as a engineer now
22:19
you're sort of more like
22:22
like maybe a manager
22:23
or the analogy I like is like you're like a
22:25
a chef in a restaurant
22:28
you know, you're the head chef
22:29
you're not cooking all the food yourself anymore
22:32
You have a team of cooks
22:33
right? You have line cooks
22:34
you have a sous chef
22:35
you know, all these different stations
22:39
and it's your job to really design the environment
22:41
You know, you
22:42
you're in charge of setting up the kitchen
22:43
You're in charge of
22:45
you know, like giving tasks to different people
22:48
So
22:51
yeah, it's a very interesting way of working
22:55
but yeah, that's, that's how I basically built
22:57
these verification skills
22:59
Yeah, just, just one follow-up there on like
23:01
I'll have to go
23:02
try to go one layer deeper
23:03
So are you, let's say we wanted to build
23:07
an eval or a skill for
23:08
for something
23:09
and we wanted to kind of get better on its own
23:11
which is, is what I think you're suggesting
23:14
are you doing that in like a work tree
23:16
kind of isolated with like the sub-agents and
23:18
and then the reviewer agents and
23:20
and all that? Is it happening like in
23:22
some type of cloud-hosted environment?
23:24
Like what's the, the more, the practical steps?
23:25
If I wanted to go do this
23:27
and like set up a verification system for something
23:29
what would I
23:29
what would I do or where would I
23:30
start?
23:34
I think that, the best place to start is local
23:37
because you can observe
23:39
You can definitely observe what your agents are doing
23:41
So, if you're building a verification skill for yourself
23:45
I would definitely start local and
23:47
just have your agent bring up the application
23:49
whether it's like a CLI or
23:51
a desktop app or whatever
23:53
And so you can actually observe
23:54
right? You can see how the agent is interacting with the
23:58
the application
23:59
You can see it
24:00
you know, how it calls like the different APIs that
24:04
that allow it to interact with the
24:06
the application
24:09
but, for me personally
24:12
I have basically been kind of all in
24:14
mostly all in on cloud agents because they're
24:16
extremely powerful
24:19
and the really powerful thing about Cursor is the
24:21
the cloud agents actually
24:23
where if you spend a little bit of
24:24
time setting up your environment
24:26
These control skills
24:28
these verification skills pay a
24:29
huge amount of dividends
24:31
because it's not just something that
24:33
makes you as a single engineer better
24:36
it actually levels up your whole team
24:38
and even your whole company because
24:41
you can actually start thinking about cloud agents
24:43
you can start thinking about automations that automatically do things like
24:49
I'll, I get, I
24:49
I kind of talk about this a bit later
24:51
but I'll just kind of Get into it
24:54
where, where, you know, for example, like
24:56
I talk a lot about this agent we have called Benny
24:58
right, who, who, you know
25:01
takes all of the bug reports that we get
25:04
and it automatically goes off in the cloud
25:06
opens up a cloud
25:07
its, you know, its desktop
25:09
It runs Cursor in its own computer
25:12
and it uses the same control skills
25:15
to interact with the application and try to reproduce the bug
25:18
or the user report
25:19
right? And this is so
25:21
so powerful because at once I can immediately
25:23
I
25:23
I get so much information from this automatically
25:26
Like here in this example
25:27
you can see that
25:28
the Benny actually reproduced the bug
25:31
but it's already fixed on me
25:34
So it actually confirms that we fixed this problem already
25:37
and all I need to do is just
25:38
release another build of
25:40
of Cursor
25:42
so that's like huge information
25:43
there that I didn't have to go off
25:45
and sit with an agent
25:46
you know, and spend an hour trying to figure
25:47
like, is this fixed? Is this not fixed?
25:50
So you, you, you gain back so much time
25:53
You know
25:53
everybody on my team benefits from this
25:55
Everybody in the company benefits from this
25:58
so definitely think that
26:00
you know, keeping these
26:02
using cloud agents is super powerful
26:05
but yeah, it's like a journey
26:06
You have to trust it first
26:08
right, before you, you get to this point
26:11
And that's, it goes back to what I was saying here
26:12
where, you know, it's very hard, it's, it's almost impossible
26:16
and I would
26:16
definitely encourage you not to try to jump from
26:19
you know, like, if you're still in this zone
26:22
you don't want to jump to
26:23
like
26:23
I'm going to spawn a hundred
26:25
or thousands of cloud agents right now
26:27
because you're just going to waste a lot of tokens
26:31
and it's going to be extremely expensive
26:33
Yeah, so just to kind of recap so far
26:35
basically the
26:36
if we wanted to go on the journey
26:37
that you've kind of gone on
26:38
it would be just start with verification
26:41
building some, some skills and some
26:43
some ways of determining that the agents are producing at least
26:46
like, correct code, whether, like you said
26:47
whether it's good code or not is maybe a separate question
26:49
but, like, it's, it's technically solving the problem by looking at
26:52
you know, Stack traces, looking at, you know
26:54
the actual behavior in the app and so
26:56
on
26:57
And then once we trust it locally
26:58
then we can start to think about scaling
27:00
into the cloud and running more
27:02
agents that are picking up signals
27:04
I guess, on their own, right?
27:04
So whether that's like a bug report that
27:06
comes in or something
27:07
and they can go and pick it up
27:08
and
27:08
solve the problem
27:09
and give us back a PR
27:11
And then maybe the last step is like auto-merging the PRs
27:13
which is where you're at
27:15
and maybe not where I want to go
27:17
And then reviewing them on main
27:18
But is that about right?
27:21
Yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, that's why I do this
27:23
this, this, this curve, right?
27:24
Because that, this, this basically describes my journey of
27:28
you know, when I started, barely could use a couple agents
27:31
and I was just observing every single thing
27:34
I think there's really no shortcut for going
27:35
from here to there
27:37
because this is really about your personal level
27:39
of trust in agents
27:41
right?
27:42
obviously, you know, as a, as an engineer
27:43
you don't want to just slot code into
27:44
production
27:46
So how do you actually build up that trust?
27:48
Takes, a lot of, I guess, taste and judgment
27:53
but, you know, like
27:54
I think plugins like PSAC definitely can help you
27:58
get up to speed much quicker
28:01
and so I guess it's like
28:03
if you trust me and you trust PSAC
28:05
then in, by extension
28:07
you can maybe trust your agents
28:08
But if you don't trust me
28:09
and I
28:10
I definitely would not encourage people to blindly trust me
28:15
you know
28:16
if you build up your own set of
28:17
skills that you can obviously
28:18
you know
28:19
take a look at PSET and kind of fork it
28:21
make it your own
28:22
improve the skills, definitely encourage that
28:25
but for me, it's really all about
28:27
it, it, it just keeps coming back to trust
28:29
You know
28:29
every one of us
28:30
here in this chat have a different standard for engineering
28:34
and there are different things that
28:35
are important for us in our codebase
28:37
and
28:38
when you
28:40
are able to encode all of that into
28:41
skills and you can verify that your agent
28:43
is actually doing them
28:45
that allows you to really kind of ascend this curve
28:47
and, you know, start automating things
28:52
there's another piece I wanted to talk about
28:55
if there's
28:56
Yeah, go for it. I'll
28:57
I'll think of more questions as I go
28:58
Yeah, I think there's a
28:59
a third part to this
29:00
which I haven't talked about yet
29:01
which is kind of an interesting one
29:03
which is like refactoring and rewriting
29:06
Like one of the
29:07
I guess most controversial
29:09
one of the most controversial topics in the industry
29:12
I think, is like
29:13
should you rewrite your app or not?
29:16
because I think engineers are very prone to this
29:19
where, especially when you join a company
29:21
you come in and you see like the
29:22
code base and you're like
29:23
oh man, this is shit
29:25
Like who wrote this code?
29:26
You know, it's, it's terrible
29:27
I want to rewrite the whole thing
29:29
There is a very common inclination and
29:31
I think a lot of
29:33
you know, before agents, and I guess arguably even now
29:36
people will definitely discourage you from re-rewriting stuff
29:40
But I'm actually here to make a case
29:41
for why you might want to consider it
29:45
because
29:47
I think it really depends
29:49
you know, Brownfield applications, I think
29:51
are actually in a pretty good spot
29:53
especially if they're set up well already
29:57
and like recently I've been talking to some people
29:58
but, you know, I, I was just observing
30:01
I, I just noticed this parallel
30:05
which is that
30:06
a lot of big tech company problems are
30:08
now everybody's problems
30:10
and the big tech company problem
30:12
you know, like when I was working at Meta
30:13
like we had this giant monorepo
30:15
we had like, I don't know
30:17
tens of thousands of engineers just
30:19
you know, like banging on their keyboards and
30:21
and shipping code
30:22
And A lot of really great engineers at Meta
30:27
but, I'll say like, you know
30:29
you'll be surprised that the code quality is
30:31
actually not that good
30:33
and so I often joke that like
30:35
you know, before AI slop, we had human slop
30:38
and so, you know
30:39
I think a lot of big tech infra
30:41
like, like what Meta has or Google
30:44
you know, you know
30:45
really big tech companies are actually designed for that
30:47
where you're, you're sort of like
30:49
you're catering to the
30:50
the, you know, like, sounds, this sounds so bad to say
30:53
but like the, the least capable engineer on your team
30:56
right? You build, you build frameworks, you build conventions, you build guardrails
31:01
you know, you restrict credentials so that
31:03
you know, your intern doesn't wipe your production database
31:08
There's, you know, if you have that level of infra already
31:12
I think your agents can actually already do
31:14
a very solid job
31:15
right? Because they have
31:17
the
31:17
the guardrails are already in place for
31:20
agents to not cause havoc or not cause too much havoc
31:23
in your codebase
31:25
and you can always add more
31:27
you know, guardrails
31:29
but I think like Greenfield applications
31:30
especially are, you know
31:31
like the brand new applications are like the biggest risk
31:35
in my opinion, and also the greatest opportunity
31:38
Because, you know, if you vibe code a project
31:41
a prototype, like we did for Grokbot
31:44
you know, Grokbot was spun up very
31:45
very, very quickly
31:47
and if you, if you haven't heard of
31:49
of Grokbot, it's like a
31:50
a new application we just launched yesterday
31:53
it's, it's really cool
31:54
lets you orchestrate your
31:57
create like individual agents that have their own identity
31:59
and you can kind of orchestrate them
32:01
It's super cool, definitely check it out
32:04
but yeah, that was, it's like a very
32:05
it was a very greenfield application
32:06
like most prototypes are
32:09
So it was like vibe coded very quickly
32:10
Humans were not reading the code at all
32:13
And, I had this tweet recently
32:17
where I said something about organic architecture
32:22
maybe I'll find it
32:24
but the idea is that
32:28
when you have a completely vibe coded application
32:30
you essentially have no guardrails whatsoever
32:32
So, your agents When you give them a task
32:37
they will just solve it in whatever
32:39
method is the most convenient
32:41
And over time, you get into this
32:44
situation where you have a code base that
32:46
is spiraling out of control
32:48
because you don't understand it
32:50
your agents understand it
32:52
I guess, in a way, but, like
32:53
they've built something that is
32:55
you know, optimized for short, for shortcuts
32:58
and, you know, it will, you will suffer, you have a lot of
33:02
of issues with that application
33:05
so I think starting your code base with
33:09
like, very strong constraints is Very much needed
33:14
because like when you have a code base
33:16
that you can trust
33:17
right, when you have guardrails that actually help you
33:21
help your agents, right, good code, you can get into the
33:24
you know, like into this part of the curve where I
33:27
I, where I, like I, I said, you know
33:29
I woke up today and I had like 20 PRs merged
33:32
by my agents, and that's because I invested a lot
33:35
a lot of time
33:37
over 600 PRs, I
33:39
I, I calculated yesterday
33:41
when I refactored all of GrokBot to this
33:44
new architecture that I've been building
33:48
and yeah, I've, I've gotten to a point where I
33:51
I don't really look
33:52
I really don't look at the code anymore
33:54
and, I say that not just
33:56
you know, to sell you tokens
33:57
but Because I, you know
34:00
it
34:00
took a lot of work to get to
34:01
that point. I spent a lot of tokens
34:03
to get
34:03
the codebase to this point where I no
34:05
longer have to look at it
34:07
But I'm very excited because
34:09
you know, of the potential where
34:11
you know, it's not just
34:12
it just doesn't just benefit me
34:13
It benefits everyone contributing to GraphBot
34:17
and it also empowers
34:18
you know, designers and product managers and
34:21
you know
34:22
even GTM people to add features to GraphBot
34:25
And I don't have to worry
34:26
you know
34:26
I don't have to wake up
34:28
at night in the middle of the night and worry like
34:30
oh shit, someone's just merged a perf regression
34:32
right? I have a ton of constraints and CI
34:35
It's like, it's actually very annoying to write code in GraphBot
34:39
but like agents absorb all of that annoyance
34:43
But yeah
34:43
I'm happy to talk about what exactly that is
34:47
Yeah, I think one question
34:50
Before we get into the
34:51
this part here is
34:52
just around that element of like what your
34:55
your
34:55
your CI looks like or maybe some of
34:56
the constraints and then also like the average
34:58
PR size. I saw a question about that
34:59
earlier
35:00
Just to give people a
35:01
you know, kind of a glance
35:02
It doesn't have to be like mathematically average
35:04
but just a, you know
35:05
like what
35:06
generally the size of the PR is
35:09
If it's only a couple lines of code or
35:10
you know, yeah. I think it depends
35:16
Let me I'm
35:18
trying to do this in a way where
35:20
I'm not going to like
35:21
Yeah, you don't have to share the actual number of it
35:23
like the actual average. This is fine
35:25
But like we have
35:27
so okay, this is not that interesting
35:30
but well
35:30
fun fact
35:31
is that virtualization in Grokbot and in
35:36
Cursor is actually powered by pretext
35:39
which is a
35:40
sort of new library that someone's built
35:44
That's really interesting. You should
35:45
you should check it out
35:47
But that's not really that important
35:48
I think the average PR size
35:50
I actually don't
35:52
know if I want to click on these
35:54
I probably can
35:56
but I would say like
35:57
they can range anywhere from
35:58
a few hundred lines or 50 lines to like a thousand
36:02
depending on what the thing is doing
36:05
so like here, I'm actually like deleting a bunch of files
36:07
so I expect that it's just like mostly deletion
36:11
but yeah, it kind of varies
36:13
There's no like hard cap or are
36:16
they all like 50 line PRs?
36:18
There's no hard cap
36:18
but
36:19
I do encourage my agents to split up
36:20
their work into multiple PRs
36:23
I do that mostly because
36:27
I like, I like the idea of
36:29
I guess maybe this is much harder to
36:30
do now as
36:31
in the world of agents and you have
36:33
like so many commits
36:34
But I like the idea that
36:35
you know
36:35
the git history is a very rich source
36:37
of context
36:39
and I like the
36:41
I like each PR to sort of
36:42
atomically describe what that Small piece of things doing
36:47
which also makes it easier for me to
36:48
revert changes and like figure out
36:50
you know, oh, I shipped a bug and it's just
36:52
it's here
36:52
right? It's not in this
36:54
40,000 line PR where who knows what
36:57
landed in there
36:59
but I
37:00
I don't have a hard cap
37:01
on PR size
37:03
Cool. And then, yeah
37:05
also quick question on like CI
37:07
So again, you don't have to go into like
37:08
the screen share like your
37:09
your CI does, but just generally
37:11
would you describe what the CI kind of looks like
37:14
or how strict it is?
37:17
yeah. So, well, specifically for Grokbot, so Dune is the
37:22
is the sort of cheeky code
37:24
code name for the architecture that we built
37:26
for Grokbot
37:28
the CI looks pretty annoying because there's checks for everything
37:34
So, like literally I have
37:37
well, if you've written any React
37:38
for example, you know
37:39
you know that one of the biggest foot
37:40
guns in React is useEffect
37:43
so in Dune
37:46
and in Grokbot we've banned use effect
37:48
So Dune is just an
37:49
you can, the, the mental model of what Dune is
37:52
you can kind of think of it as like Next.js for
37:55
electron apps, and it's designed for agents to write
37:59
and it's like custom for
38:00
you know, our agent powered applications
38:04
so the CI checks are very like specific to that
38:06
like, you know, don't use use effect
38:08
It's, it's, it's banned, like CI will fail
38:11
and yell at you
38:12
We have, like
38:14
some of the more interesting ones that people
38:15
might raise eyebrows is like
38:17
I actually ban code comments as well
38:20
which is very interesting
38:22
but I've noticed that
38:24
99% of the time
38:25
agents just write code comments that
38:28
kind of describe some historical thing that is
38:30
actually totally irrelevant to the code
38:34
like it will often say like
38:34
you know, oh, Lauren said you should never do this
38:36
and it's now in
38:37
in a code comment. I'm like
38:38
what?
38:39
Like, why? That, that was
38:40
I didn't say that as like a durable
38:42
you know, global rule. I just meant like
38:44
Your
38:45
this PR sucks and you should change that
38:47
part
38:48
agents don't really understand us that well
38:51
surprisingly
38:53
and or they kind of assume too much
38:55
and they kind of do things in like
38:56
very stupid ways
38:58
So like, yeah, we just ban everything
39:00
Everything you can imagine like the agents are bad at
39:03
we ban
39:04
so
39:05
one example that we actually suffer a lot
39:07
in the agents window is we have
39:11
you know, if you've used agents window
39:12
you've definitely seen performance issues and
39:14
you know, we're constantly trying to fix them
39:16
but it's like a
39:18
It's a never-ending struggle
39:20
because there's so many pull requests that get
39:22
merged
39:23
Any one of them could just regress
39:25
performance or stability or reliability
39:27
you know
39:28
the agents window doesn't have this architecture yet
39:30
I plan to do
39:31
bring this learning back there
39:33
and kind of refactor everything there
39:36
but, it just regresses super often
39:39
because, there's, just one example is like
39:42
we have very poor
39:44
isolation between processes
39:46
So
39:47
like on, you know, on, on Electron
39:48
you have a renderer thread that renders your UI
39:51
but you also have like a main thread
39:52
that you can run other code that
39:53
you know, doesn't need to block the renderer
39:57
but we do a poor job of separating those things
40:00
and so oftentimes you just accidentally
40:02
have code that gets pulled into running on the renderer thread
40:06
right? And then all of a sudden you're competing with the
40:08
the renderer that, you know, that has a very
40:11
if you want like 60 FPS
40:12
you have to
40:13
every frame that gets drawn
40:15
has to be done in 16 milliseconds
40:17
So very, very small. You know
40:18
deadline per frame
40:20
if you want, you know
40:21
a very smooth product
40:23
and when you start building
40:24
bringing in, accidentally bringing in, you know
40:26
things that are
40:27
like very computationally heavy or they have a lot of IO
40:31
then you just get into like a lot
40:33
of jank
40:34
And your, your FPS really drops
40:36
you start, you know, losing frames
40:38
you get long tasks that take more than 16 milliseconds
40:41
and then you just get this really choppy
40:43
experience
40:44
So all of those patterns that we've learned
40:46
basically building electron apps
40:48
we've encoded into this framework
40:50
and it becomes like a hard failure
40:52
So I literally, in, in Grokbot
40:54
we literally have a directory called electron main
40:57
electron renderer, and we have, import CI, I guess
41:03
where we actually
41:04
check the dependency graph to make sure they're
41:06
not accidentally importing
41:08
code from one directory to another
41:10
so that's enforced by CI
41:13
as well as BugBot
41:15
which is our, which cursors
41:18
like code review tool that runs on CI
41:21
you know, in our agents MD
41:22
it's everywhere, like, so I, I, I
41:26
I have this thing here where I talk about like
41:29
you know, like there are multiple layers
41:31
I think, for building a good code base
41:34
obviously the code base is one where
41:37
if you have an architecture like this
41:39
where it's extremely strict
41:41
you know, the, the
41:42
the way to build features is very conventional
41:44
that's like the strongest
41:46
strongest level of enforcement
41:48
because agents just love to copy existing patterns
41:51
So
41:52
one example of this in Robot is like we have this
41:55
these concepts called like a feature
41:57
and we have entry points and transcript cards
41:59
like, oh, you know
42:00
the cards that you see in the chat
42:02
These are all like
42:03
like
42:04
nouns, I guess, in, in the framework
42:06
and so there's a very conventional way of creating them
42:09
and So like a feature is all in
42:12
in a single directory as an example
42:14
And so all of the code that contributes
42:16
to that feature lives in one directory
42:18
So it's all co-located in one place
42:20
Makes it super easy. You know
42:21
agents don't have to like
42:23
grab around and try to figure out like
42:24
where all the things are
42:26
It just looks at the feature and like
42:27
oh, okay
42:28
I'm working on the onboarding feature in Grokbot
42:32
I'm just going to work in this directory
42:33
And for 80% of the work
42:35
it's mostly just very encapsulated there
42:38
But, like, it's like very, it's like designed again for
42:43
you know, like the dumbest agent
42:44
like you don't have to think
42:45
right? The, the, the
42:48
one of the key principles I have for
42:49
this framework is like the shortest
42:52
the shortest path is the best path
42:55
So
42:55
because that
42:56
plays exactly to how agents love to write codes
42:59
Like, they like to take shortcuts
43:00
really
43:01
You know
43:01
they'll find the quickest way to
43:03
solve the problem
43:05
So
43:05
why not make that the best
43:07
way to solve the problem?
43:09
so, I, I
43:10
I probably won't get into all the specific details
43:12
and
43:15
this framework's really more of a collection of
43:16
ideas and principles rather than something that will
43:19
open source
43:20
you can, you can, you know, screenshot this, I guess, if you want, and
43:24
tell your agent to
43:26
do some, build, build something like this for you too
43:30
yeah, but it's really all about the layers
43:32
you know, like the
43:33
the code base is one part with features
43:36
and directories and, you know, import, blocking import dependencies, that shouldn't be imported
43:43
but, and
43:44
and it all enforces that and static analysis
43:46
So like, there's CI checks
43:49
we have a lot of lint
43:50
for bad patterns that we observe
43:53
compiler diagnostics
43:55
there's also rules and bug bot
43:57
which are, I think like three
44:00
four, five are more soft
44:02
right? These two actually make
44:04
make CI red, right?
44:06
So that, you know
44:07
there's a hard constraint where the agent can't
44:09
just write crappy code
44:12
For rules and skills and bug bot
44:15
Your agents can still forget
44:17
right? You can still
44:18
or it may not always consistently apply them
44:21
So I like to layer them
44:24
but I don't
44:25
I don't like to
44:26
rely on them as the only source
44:28
of enforcement because it's very
44:30
very soft, right? And if you
44:31
if you only have rules and bugba and
44:33
skills and a style guide for your code
44:35
you will
44:37
it's only a matter of time before your
44:38
code base looks like complete trash
44:41
sorry to say that
44:42
but, I definitely recommend, yeah, like, you know, investing
44:45
in, you know, things that can be hard enforced
44:48
right? And this is why
44:50
you know, maybe
44:51
the choice of tech stack that you use
44:52
is also very important
44:55
like I think, for example, Rust is sort of making
44:58
you know, it's like getting super popular again
45:01
because the compiler is so strict
45:03
right? The compiler enforces so many different things
45:06
you know, there's a borrow checker that you have to appease
45:09
and if
45:09
as long as you make sure your agents
45:10
don't write unsafe code blocks
45:13
you can more or less feel
45:14
somewhat confident That if the code compiles
45:17
it probably works and it's good
45:19
But it gives you that level of
45:21
trust and confidence
45:23
that
45:23
you
45:24
as a human engineer no longer
45:26
need to go and check it yourself
45:28
You know
45:29
you rely on
45:30
code and static analysis to actually
45:34
make that a lot smoother
45:38
And I guess the worst part
45:39
the worst
45:40
place to be in is if
45:42
you are stuck in code review land
45:44
where you actually enforce all of the constraints
45:46
the invariants in your code base by
45:49
literally the human person saying
45:51
you know, reading the code and like
45:52
okay, you should not do this
45:54
right?
45:55
Every time you have to do that
45:56
you should consider that as a code smell
45:58
like a anti-pattern, and you should say
46:00
okay, instead of me commenting on the PR
46:03
how do I turn this into a hard rule
46:06
right? How do I turn this into a
46:07
lint rule?
46:08
How do I turn this into a CI
46:09
failure?
46:10
Or how do I even categorically eliminate this problem entirely?
46:17
I, I can talk about another migration I've done
46:18
but I'll probably pause here
46:20
Sure. Yeah, I feel like that's
46:22
that's where I am
46:23
to be honest, is, is what you're describing right now
46:25
which is that, like
46:25
I don't have all of these rules
46:27
so I have some things to go do after this session
46:30
in terms of being able to scale my agents
46:31
I'm, I'm definitely on, like, the
46:34
you know, maybe a couple of parallel ones locally stage
46:36
like two to three locally
46:38
and I'm sure most people here are on the same
46:39
So, yeah
46:41
I know we only have a couple minutes left
46:42
Lauren, was there anything else that you wanted to
46:44
to highlight?
46:45
I, obviously, there's lots of questions
46:46
so I can grab more
46:47
but I want to give you a few minutes
46:49
if there's anything else you want to talk about
46:50
Well, I think I've been yapping for quite a lot
46:51
so I'm, maybe let's just do questions
46:54
Okay, cool
46:55
one question that had
46:56
a couple of
46:57
came up a couple of times was just around
46:58
like, token usage
47:00
So the, the question is, like, is
47:02
is what you're describing a realistic thing for
47:04
people who are on
47:06
you know, a
47:07
a normal set of token usage they don't have
47:10
you know, basically unlimited tokens, to work with?
47:14
I think that's a really good point
47:15
I mean, like, obviously, you know
47:16
I work at a AI lab where we have unlimited tokens
47:19
so, I definitely cannot say that
47:24
you know
47:24
this is something everyone
47:26
should do in the exact same way that
47:28
I did it
47:28
I think it's possible to get to this point without
47:30
you know, breaking the bank
47:33
But, you know, if you're like an engineering leader or
47:35
you know, you have a startup that you lead
47:39
I think the thing is a question of
47:40
ROI
47:41
and it's like, yes
47:44
you spend
47:45
a lot of money
47:46
on tokens in the upfront stage
47:48
You know
47:49
like refactoring your code base is going to
47:50
take a lot of tokens
47:52
adding all these things
47:53
is going to take a bunch of tokens
47:55
But
47:56
if we're heading to a world where agents
47:58
are writing all the code
47:59
and, you know, you want to be very lean
48:03
right? You don't want to have to hire
48:04
you don't want to be
48:05
you don't want to become like meta
48:06
right? Like, I mean, like in terms of
48:08
you don't want to become
48:09
a 10,000 person engineering org because I mean
48:12
that's a cool problem to have
48:14
but also, you know
48:15
you have so much overhead
48:16
There's like planning, you know, like
48:19
it's, it's, personally, I, I wouldn't, it's not super fun
48:24
But, I think you want to stay very nimble
48:26
right? And you want to
48:27
you want to be
48:28
like
48:28
agents are all about
48:29
allowing you to do
48:30
things that you couldn't do before
48:32
That's really, to me, like, the value of agents
48:35
You know
48:35
it's not just throwing tokens on every single little thing
48:39
But, to me, like, the thing I couldn't do before is
48:41
like, enforce this level of constraints in a codebase by myself
48:47
right? Like, I'm just a single person
48:49
you know
48:50
it would have taken me years to build this framework
48:53
and do all the refactoring
48:55
and Test everything myself and verify
48:59
you know, like run, imagine if there, it was just me
49:01
right? No, in, in pre-agent era
49:03
just like running, you know, by my
49:05
it would take me so long
49:07
right? And my salary is pretty high
49:09
right? Like, so, you know, the
49:11
the question I think an engineering leader might
49:13
have is just then
49:14
you know, like, what is, there's a trade-off of
49:17
do you hire someone to do this
49:19
or do you spend the tokens to set
49:21
up a code base so that even the
49:23
the most naive, right
49:25
the dumbest agents can do a good job?
49:28
And when you actually get to this point
49:30
like even agents that are not
49:32
you know, fable size do an excellent job of writing code
49:36
and this pays a lot of dividends as
49:37
well for me personally
49:39
where I've empowered not just myself
49:42
but again, like PMs, designers
49:45
engineers who are not familiar with Grokbot to
49:47
just contribute in a way that is sustainable
49:52
So I think, yeah
49:53
it's definitely like a trade-off for sure
49:55
You know, like nothing's like free for sure
49:57
and tokens are pretty expensive
49:59
but oh, actually, I, I
50:02
I don't know how many of you have seen this
50:04
but we actually announced Grok 4.6 today
50:06
So very exciting, finally out
50:09
so yeah, Grok 4.6 would be like a great
50:11
it's very, very smart
50:13
it's really good on the
50:14
on the benchmarks
50:16
and it's the same
50:17
the tokens, well, hopefully I'm not saying this incorrectly
50:20
but
50:21
I believe the
50:22
cost per token is the same as 4.5
50:25
So you're actually getting
50:26
more intelligence for the same cost
50:30
I think this is an area that Cursor tries to
50:32
Cursor and SpaceX AI try to really optimize for
50:36
like that Pareto frontier of
50:38
you know, cost versus intelligence
50:41
you know
50:41
we don't necessarily want to build the biggest
50:43
model ever because that is extremely expensive to
50:46
run
50:47
It's really about like
50:48
how do you find that sweet spot
50:49
right? You don't, you don't need a giant model
50:51
but it's just super Right
50:52
and it's not very expensive for inference
50:56
but, yeah, I think to kind of round it up
51:00
I think it's like a
51:01
it's, it's, there's a, if you do your own analysis
51:04
I feel like it's pretty positive
51:06
It'll be pretty positive that
51:08
the ROI you get from investing in stuff like this
51:12
just empowers not just yourself
51:14
but your whole team to be so much more productive
51:17
right? Like
51:17
imagine if you have an army of
51:19
engineers like me who are shipping so much improvements and
51:23
and bug fixes, you know, every day, right?
51:26
Like, that is pretty exciting
51:29
Cool
51:30
one last question before we wrap up
51:32
this one is for the people in product on the
51:34
on the call
51:34
So
51:35
let's say we do have a number of
51:36
engineers who are shipping like Lauren
51:38
I'm just curious
51:39
like
51:40
how is the product team or other functions
51:41
of your company keeping up given that
51:44
like if you're shipping so quickly
51:46
have, have
51:46
are they using AI more to do their
51:47
jobs? Like as much as you can speak to that
51:49
and obviously you don't have
51:51
like you're not in that role
51:51
but just curious about how that works
51:54
I think this is where Grokbot has been actually exceedingly powerful
51:59
where, so before Grokbot, like, you know
52:02
obviously cursor only had cursor
52:04
like we only had agents window
52:05
we had a CLI
52:06
we had an IDE
52:08
and these are really like power user tools
52:11
right? Like they're designed for developers
52:13
so it's very, very developer centric
52:15
You can do knowledge work in them
52:17
but it like the UI is not really
52:18
optimized for that
52:20
So we actually didn't really have
52:23
well, I think like a lot of people like
52:25
you know, GTM product, like they might have used cursor
52:29
to do their work
52:30
but it definitely wasn't like a delightful experience
52:32
for them
52:34
I think now with Grokbot
52:36
it's become
52:38
Grokbot is basically like their cursor moment for
52:41
people who are not in tech
52:42
in my opinion. Like it's like
52:44
it's like a very
52:45
very accessible way to use agents in a very comfortable
52:48
very familiar interface. It looks like iMessage
52:52
and it's very fun to
52:54
you know
52:54
you can give your agent a fun name
52:56
you can have
52:57
you can kind of
52:57
do orchestration
52:59
within a very like natural way where you can sort of
53:02
you know
53:02
each agent's like a person and now you
53:03
got a team of agents like working on
53:05
you have one
53:05
one agent per account that you manage as
53:07
an example
53:08
Or if you're a PM
53:09
you have, you know
53:10
you can have an agent that summarizes all
53:12
the work that Lauren did last night
53:13
And then now you know what I did
53:14
right?
53:16
So I think our PMs are leveraging that a lot
53:18
and their shipping code too
53:20
so, you know, like oftentimes they will just say
53:22
"Oh, here's a bug, I fixed it
53:24
Can you look at it?" And then I'll go review it
53:26
and actually, it's just perfect on my okay stamp
53:29
so, that, I think that shows that
53:31
you know, the, the dune architecture is holding up
53:33
right?
53:34
The, all the
53:35
the really strict constraints allow
53:38
people who are not experts in engineering to
53:40
contribute at a high level
53:42
so I'm
53:42
I feel like I'm already seeing
53:44
that pay off a lot where
53:46
you know, designers and PMs are just able to
53:49
to, to ship features directly
53:52
and that just makes the Grokbot team super fast
53:56
right? Where we can ship so quickly
54:00
and we have a lot planned
54:01
so I'm very excited
54:03
to, you know, to, to ship more
54:06
ship more stuff

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