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Oli's avatar

honestly the hardest part of building on LLMs isn't the tech — it's that whatever stack you commit to today feels like it'll be obsolete by the time you ship. your talk perfectly captures how much the landscape shifted in just six months. kinda exhausting to keep up lol

Colleen Avarene's avatar

Simon — the "often-work to mostly-work" line is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it deserves to. That's the actual inflection point for most businesses — not the benchmark leaderboard, but the moment you stop babysitting the output.

I work with a team that builds custom AI agents for small businesses. The thing we've watched shift in real time is exactly what you're describing — programming languages as lock-in collapsing. Six months ago a client's agent was built in one stack and that was a commitment. Now we're rebuilding pieces in whatever fits the job because the switching cost dropped through the floor. That's not a technical detail — it changes what you say yes to.

The Shopify "osmosis learning" bit is the part I want to hear more about. An agent operating in public Slack channels so the whole team absorbs how it thinks. That's the opposite of the black box problem Addy Osmani just wrote about with comprehension debt. One approach hides the work. The other makes the work visible so humans can pattern-match alongside it. I think the teams that figure out which tasks need which approach are the ones that actually benefit from this wave instead of just surfing it.

The pelican test is perfect. The ridiculous tasks are the honest ones.

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