The Problem Wasn't the Model
I spent the first three months treating AI like a calculator. Type a question, get an answer. Occasionally useful, mostly generic.
I spent the first three months treating AI like a calculator. Type a question, get an answer. Occasionally useful, mostly generic.
You're probably sick of being told to learn AI tools. But this isn't that post.
The agent hype isn't about AI capability. It's about human org design, and we're copying the wrong thing.
Five things AI can't replace: trust, context, distribution, taste, and liability. These aren't product categories. They're structural layers that become more valuable as AI gets better, not less.
The piece I wrote on harnesses described five component layers that every production agentic system needs: orchestration and planning, an execution environment, validation and quality control, context and memory management, and logic and interaction.
Unpopular opinion: building AI workflows that stop for human confirmation isn't careful design. It might just be discomfort dressed up as caution.
The brand work we did at Wild Earth was real. We were selling through Instagram and Facebook, and on those channels emotional resonance isn't a nice-to-have, it's the mechanism. The photography, the dog stories, the community, the tone of voice. People were scrolling and we had about two seconds to make them feel something. It worked. Brand investment drove revenue in a way that was measurable and direct.
OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open-source AI agent of 2026, with over 100,000 GitHub stars and a skills ecosystem anyone can extend. I built a skill that replaced my HelloFresh subscription, and what it took to build it says something about where a lot of billion-dollar convenience businesses are headed.
Urgency works on humans. Scarcity works on humans. Beautiful photography works on humans. You've spent years getting these things right — the above-the-fold her
Amazon blocks agent crawlers. That's not a technical decision. It's a strategic one.
When an AI agent visits your store, it doesn't see your homepage or your brand story. It reads product identifiers, schema markup, protocol manifests, and check
The next wave of buyers won't have feelings about your brand. They'll have decision criteria. AI agents are already making purchasing decisions in software, and