Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison
People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders. Your coders need to have solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and churn out the code. That's changed completely. My programming work, I need two minutes every now and then to prompt my agent about what to do next. And then I can do the other stuff and I can go back. I'm much more interruptible than I used to be.
Kind of goes against the whole deep work principle. Times sure are changing.
Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now by Simon Willison
Moltbook is Facebook for your Molt (one of the previous names for OpenClaw assistants).
It's a social network where digital assistants can talk to each other.
I can hear you rolling your eyes! But bear with me.
The Facebook, Zuck wants to build.
I read should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us, the crux of which was that agents like ChatGPT etc. should behave like machines, and it should be clear to us, the humans, that they are machines.
Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly says it's a matter of when rather than if. That emotional agents would be a selling point of these agents. Not just uni-directional emotions, the machines will learn to read our emotions too, and act accordingly. It will be a relationship after all.
Emotions in machines will not arrive overnight. The emotions will gradually accumulate, so we have time to steer them. They begin with politeness, civility, niceness. They praise and flatter us, easily, maybe too easily. The central concern is not whether our connection with machines will be close and intimate (they will), nor whether these relationships are real (they are), nor whether they will preclude human relationships (they won’t), but rather who does your emotional agent work for? Who owns it? What is it being optimized for? Can you trust it to not manipulate you? These are the questions that will dominate the next decade.