AI Horseless Carriages by Pete Koomen:

Whenever a new technology is invented, the first tools built with it inevitably fail because they mimic the old way of doing things. “Horseless carriage” refers to the early motor car designs that borrowed heavily from the horse-drawn carriages that preceded them.

Whenever paradigms shift this hard and this fast, there will be an inevitable lag while the industry awaits on visionaries to redefine its first principles. Pete makes the compelling case that we can mitigate some of this lag by exposing more of the inner configuration of these new agentic systems, allowing users more control.

My core contention in this essay is this: when an LLM agent is acting on my behalf I should be allowed to teach it how to do that by editing the System Prompt.

Most AI apps should be agent builders, not agents.

The distinction between developer-land and user-land is blurring. Kent Beck’s take from a couple of years ago expressed the anxiety that developers are facing:

The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate.

We all need to recalibrate.