Joel Shackleton

When a non-parent says they’re tired at any point of their day/life

Whether it’s existing consulting firms, new ones that emerge, FDEs from agent vendors, or new internal agent engineering roles, the amount of work that is going to be created to implement agents in enterprises will exceed anything we imagine today. The complexity of implementing agents in any existing organizations is very real. When I talk to large enterprises, as you move from a chat paradigm to agents that participate in meaningful workflows, there are a number of things they need to do. First, you have to get agents to be able to talk to your data securely across your systems. In many cases, enterprises have decades of legacy infrastructure that contain the valuable context for AI agents. That’s going to take a ton of work to go modernize and move to systems that work well with agents. Then, you need to ensure that you’ve implemented agents with the right access controls and entitlements, the right scopes to be safely used, and have ways of monitoring, logging, and securing the work that they do. Next, you need to actually document the processes in the organization in a way that agents can utilize for doing the work. You also need to figure out what the new workflow looks like when agents and people are working together on a process, and who steps in where. Just replicating the old workflow will mute the gains. Oh and you likely need to create evals for your top new end-state processes. Finally, you have to keep up with a rapidly changing set of best practices and architectural shifts happening in the agent space. While it’s fun for people to change their personal productivity tools on a dime, it’s 100X harder to do this in a business process. The speed of change is a blessing and a curse right now for anyone trying to keep a stable system design. All of this means that individuals and companies that develop expertise on the above set of components (and more) are going to be needed to help organizations actually implement agents at scale. This is also the rationale for vertical AI agents right now that can go in deep on a business domain and help bring automation to it. This is a huge opportunity right now whether you’re doing this internally or as an external business provider.

Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP, on why showing up early and staying late beats being the smartest person in the room: "I'm not smarter than anybody else, but I can outwork you." Bloomberg shares his key to success: "Make sure you're the first one in there every day and the last one to leave. Don't ever take a lunch break or go to the bathroom. You keep working. You never know when that opportunity is going to come along." He explains how this approach shaped his early career at Salomon Brothers. The managing partner of the company, Bill Salomon, was the second person to arrive each morning. @MikeBloomberg was the only other one in the big trading room. "If he had needed to borrow a match… if he wanted to ask something about a newspaper or a stock, he came over and so we became buddies." The same thing happened at the end of the day. The number two guy, John Gutfreund, was the last one to leave except for Bloomberg. They'd share a cab or take the subway uptown together. "You can't control that you're the smartest guy. There'll always be somebody smarter. But if you're there, then you absorb things. You put things together in ways that if you didn't have all that experience…" He compares it to skiing: "Reading a book on skiing doesn't teach you how to ski. You got to go and you got to ski and get lots of miles under your skis. And incidentally, if you don't fall, you're not skiing hard enough and you're not learning anything." Bloomberg also touches on resilience when things don't go your way: "You got to be smart enough to say, 'Hey, I tried it. Don't let your ego get in the way. I can't keep doing this. I've got to earn a living, but a year from now, I'm going to come up with a better idea and then I'll go back and do it again.'" He closes with a mindset that defined his career: "There's never been a day that I haven't looked forward to going into work. Even the days I knew I was going to get beaten up. Even the day I knew I was going to get fired. I'd never been fired before. I wonder what it's like. Okay, let's go find out."

New newsletter: MODERN FATHERHOOD WOULD BE UNRECOGNIZABLE TO A 1950'S DAD Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time. The new American dad is more present and more exhausted—but also, more satisfied with life. What's behind this half-century transformation? Today's piece combines history, economic analysis, and gorgeous charts galore from @AzizSunderji

Shifting from an investor... to a trader. A few thoughts. LT Investing died for me in 2022. The nature and structure of markets, the geopolitical paradigm and how asset pricing works today meant I had to shift my approach.

After having gone for a walk: 1) Big Idea. No details. See pattern. 2) I don't have a problem with projects being funded via more of an equity stake model vs. subsidy. If taxpayers are backing a project, taxpayers should get a direct return on it. But... 3) If our problems are rooted in internal sclerosis, red tape, and regulatory problems (they are!) then a fund is correcting for the wrong problems. Lack of access to capital is not the issue. Nobody has faith we can actually build stuff good. That's the trust that needs to be restored. 3a) Government is dumb money. We're bad at picking market winners and losers, especially where political motivation is involved. Sometimes a necessity, however. 3b) $25 billion is not going to buy you very much. 4) How is the hell is this "Sovereign Wealth Fund" actually going to be capitalized? If it's via debt and "catalyzed" private investment, well then, all you've announced is an iteration on the Canada Infrastructure Bank and CGF. 5) If Canada is planning to capitalize this fund on an O&G windfall tax in the middle of a separatist crisis, I will walk myself directly off a cliff.

The year is 2047. The Canadian Infrastructure Bank, the Canadian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Canada Pension Plan and the Business Development Bank of Canada each nominate one warrior to fight to the death for the honour of owning a 15% stake of a new sushi restaurant.

Agentic coding is a huge boon for software developers that want to get far more done, great for IT people to build vastly more custom systems internally, great for domain experts that want to automate workflows or wire systems together, and absolutely fantastic for anyone curious to learn how to start coding. What it’s less great for is casually building complex software that you have to maintain on an ongoing basis and take on all the risk for. Upgrades, maintenance, keeping up to date with latest security issues, and so on, are taxes most knowledge workers aren’t familiar with or prepared for. Net net: we’re going to get 100X more software and vastly more software developers in the future. But that’s different from *everyone* rolling their own.

You made 10x your money in two years if you bought this when FCF bottomed out and held to the highs. Good reminder that money is made not by lazily putting a multiple on backwards looking financials, but by having a variant view on the true earnings power of a business in the future. The consensus view at the bottom was that SPOT would never make money even though the inflection was rather obvious to anyone not looking in the rearview mirror.

🚨The Iran war just handed America the energy dominance no policy ever could. US crude exports: 5.2 million barrels per day a record. Europe sourcing over 1/3 of its jet fuel from US refineries. Asia signing long-term LNG contracts with American suppliers because there is nowhere else to turn. Europe and Asia are getting the message and they don't love it. Both regions are now wary of swapping Gulf dependency for Washington dependency especially after US officials used energy as a lever in trade talks. The war redirect oil flows and handed the US a chokehold over who gets energy and on what terms. De-dollarization was the plan. Energy diversification was the goal. Hormuz closed and both went into reverse simultaneously. The new energy map looks nothing like the old one and the full picture of who wins, who loses, and where the real trade is hiding is in my latest article👇 open.substack.com/pub/themerchan…

Bill Ackman is right… 2005-2020, globalisation and Chinese urbanisation caused 15 years of global deflation and a long era of ZIRP. 2025-2045, AI will likely cause a long period of deflation (big productivity gains) and likely a long era of ZIRP. The West mostly failed to make use of the first ZIRP era, we didn’t understand it. We did not replace and upgrade our infrastructure, we did not roll SovX far into the future. I expect we will not repeat this mistake, during the AI buildout. A huge amount of infrastructure is going to be built over the next 20 years, backed with long dated cheap bonds. This is the monetary and fiscal structure of the era we find ourselves in. You are now leaving the eye of the storm.

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see. @eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

This is probably the biggest news yet in software going headless, and will bring knowledge work agents to the masses. The new ChatGPT agents have access to any of the tools and data you want to work with, with complete coding and tool use available to them. Here's an example of a custom sales assistant agent uses Box as a knowledge source for accessing enterprise content securely to answer questions and generate new content on the fly. The workflows can obviously vastly far more complex as the agent can use any of the tools within Box available via MCP and CLI. This precisely what agents will start to look like for knowledge work. You'll be able to spin them up in the foreground or background to help augment work. Big opportunity right now for headless platforms, and for all the new builders and designers of these agents in the enterprise.

This essay by @alexolegimas is the best thing I've ever read on why AGI won't lead to mass unemployment. A compelling argument backed up by substantial empirical data.

What Role Does Not Exist Today But Will Be So Common in Five Years Time: "500K-1M jobs will be created for agent operators. This person will be somewhat technical. They will be deep in the AI world. They're gonna have to understand MCPs and CLIs and they are going to have to know how to write skills. It's going be this group of people that will know how to go into your marketing team or your legal team, or your operations team, or your life sciences research team and this is the person that is basically going to enable that function to get leverage from agents." @levie Where is this right? Where is this wrong? @jasonlk @gregisenberg @amasad @AnjneyMidha

The jump from working with a chatbot to having an agent that actually helps automate a process requires a real amount of work. Most companies will need to have dedicated people that are responsible for bringing automation to their teams, instead of leaving this up to every individual employee. Partly because the work is more technical than we imagine today, and partly because it’s just hard to do this as a side project. The job spec is to map out new workflows with agents, implement new systems to deploy agents, make sure the agent has all the right (up to date) context to work with, wiring up internal systems to connect to the agents, creating evals for the agents, figuring out where the human is in the loop, managing the system when there are new upgrades, helping with the change management of the existing business process, and so on. These jobs may come from IT or engineering, or live directly in the business function itself. They’ll be called different things depending on the company, and in some sense it’s the future of software engineering that you’ll see a huge growth of in non-tech companies. Most companies will have to be hiring for this now or in the future, and it’s another example of the kind of new jobs that will be created in AI.

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska techrepublicbook.com

Agents are here