{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Agents and Engineers: Agentic AI, Software, and Agentic Engineering","title":"Unharness Your Agents","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3941,"description":"Dan and John Berryman discuss why today’s terminal- and IDE-centered agent harnesses are too narrow. John argues that agents should be able to see and act across the applications, websites, files, and physical environments that make up a person’s life. His Rook project is an attempt to make those contexts addressable while allowing people to keep using the agent harnesses they already trust.\nThe conversation turns to a future in which websites expose agent-facing capabilities and applications reshape themselves around conversations. John imagines an assistant that can combine a person’s notes and shopping list with location, store inventory, and aisle information. He says feasibility is the major barrier that recently moved into reach, while security, transparency, trust, and standardization remain unresolved.\nThat tension becomes concrete in the discussion of permissions and sandboxing. John expects people to begin with constrained, read-only access and gradually grant more authority, with dry runs, approvals, and reversibility helping determine when an agent can act on its own. He also points to emerging conventions such as skills files, AGENTS.md, and llms.txt as ways for agents to discover what they can do in a given domain.\nJohn’s strongest practical advice is to replace bespoke workflow code with skills written in plain English whenever the model is capable enough to follow the instructions. He describes building a Zoom assistant and a candidate-vetting workflow this way, arguing that subject-matter experts may eventually be able to read and rewrite the software directly. In his view, the agent is increasingly just a loop around a model and tools, with frameworks such as LangGraph becoming less necessary for many applications.\nThe discussion of memory is more skeptical. John argues that chunking old conversations and retrieving them by textual similarity does not reproduce the way human experience turns mistakes into procedural knowledge and taste. For now,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/TK0Nqa_Yt1Nidvhw7SvORku00Quhyrr-EpS6aCekMzA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9hMmU5/YmJlYjNlY2E2ZThh/OGYwZmExY2M5MGMz/MDQyNC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}