I don't live in a world where I need to be constantly reading and replying to emails, so 95% of my inbox is just subscription spam. With development I need to be at the helm to design the planning requirements and actively make decisions before the agent goes off and executes the plan. But I don't need a personal agent for that, I work directly out of codex/claude-code.
I've also been building a harness that maintains my apps which I'm hoping to open source.
Hard agree that these things don't have personal ROI, and are actually quite hard to build reliably.
But it's really fun! And having a bot fix a live error is pretty exciting.
LLM was invented and its just clear that this is something someone needs to build.
Why?
Because it makes just sense. You don't want an agent running on a laptop you close. You want to keep context small, you want to split up work / parallize it etc.
I'm now waiting for a while until the open source agent platform emerges and im borderline motivated to build something but i'm not doing it. He did, which is not a crime.
Great write up!
That said, my vision is to eventually build manager agents to manage the minion agents. Like real people. I have no idea if "people" is the right analogy for all this work but my brain can't really wrap around a different analogy yet.
being able to talk to each of the agents via dm (but also in group chats) sounds interesting
does that mean that you have 1 chat per domain specific agent? can you also start multiple sessions/threads or is that not part of the way you interact with them currently?
It's literally just like humans.. except. not.
I also have a claude max plan for coding but like I mentioned in the article coding is still separate from the agents.
> Has it been worth it? For the journey, yes, for the ROI, nope.
It's also nice seeing someone experiment without succumbing to AI psychosis.
$48/month for the droplet (could probably be cheaper on Hertzner) and $100/month for OpenAI plan. so ~$150/month but again this could be cheaper with a different VPS and using Terra/Luna.
I also have a claude max plan for coding but like I mentioned in the article coding is still separate from the agents.
It's fine as a search tool or autocomplete. It can be okay to generate code if you didn't know how else to get started, or you've already limited the damage it would do by your own design.
People who overuse LLMs are usually trying to compensate for their lack of experience, structure in their work, or dysfunctional teams. Anyone trying to get hired should recognize it as a new red flag attempting to cover up the old red flags.
It does not cost too much effort to maintain MCP servers. No port forwarding or VPNs required thanks to OpenAI tunnels.
And security wise its quite nice, since you have to activate MCP or give permission sometimes. So each chat is kind of isolated from each-other.
Personally, I feel skills+CLI is better, since only the description of the skill enters the context window until it’s required and CLIs should support help flags which will allow you do have progressive discovery.
And a CLI is also easy to use yourself.
First, it matters how well the MCP is written; a well-written one won't be so massive
Secondly, different sessions should load different MCPs. Load only what is needed
Thirdly, if you're finding you need a dozen MCPs, you need to consolidate that into a single service that does the work and then presents a single, unified API (via MCP) to your agent
Finally, start using models with 1M context window limits. I really don't know how people can stand being stuck at a limit like 272K.