Why Every Traded Personal Agents for One Company Agent

Dan Shipper (0:00)

The hot thing right now is DOTS. They're persistent agents from OpenAI. I was there at Dev Day when they launched them, I interviewed Sam about them, and I've been using DOTS since before they came out, and now we're into week two of DOTS. So how's it going? If you read my VibeCheck, you know that I thought they were a little bit rough to begin with, but that the idea of a persistent, proactive agent was obviously the future.

Even before DOTS launched, they'd become my main way of interacting with ChatGPT, and they're still that way after launch. I'm really excited about the little things they've been doing to make the experience less buggy and more complete, and I think it'll get even better over the next couple of weeks. What's been really interesting, though, is seeing the team at Every. We've got about 30 people, seeing them start to adopt it, and some of the use cases that have started to emerge. So in case you're looking for some use cases, I actually had My.dot collect some use cases to talk to you about.

So one thing that dots are really useful for is keeping up with school emails. So Kieran Klassen, who works at Every, says that it scans all of the school emails he gets from his kid's school and tells him what he needs to know. Another thing that dots are really good for is catching access requests or like little things, little messages you might have missed in Slack and making sure that you get them. So Ariel Shipper, our head of operations, her dot caught a few people asking for different accounts across the company and asked if she wanted it to just approve access. Dots are also really good for working when you're not at your computer or your hands are full. So our head of video, Randy Koonsman, was running around yesterday trying to get our launch video out for The Every Agent which launched and he was doing work for that launch just on the phone with his dot, talking it through different video edits and different things he needed to get done. I also think this is something that came up in my interview with Sam and I feel this too. Dots are really good for filtering out all of the noise that you don't really want to see and only showing you stuff that really matters. So for example, I was doing a lot of model testing over the weekend and normally model testing requires me to be in the Every Slack, which once I'm in Slack, it's just like this rabbit hole of I'm just going down doing tons and tons and tons of work. And what was amazing about using my dot doing model testing was I was able to post the results of all the experiments I was running in Slack. And if someone responded that my dot would tell me about the response, which would help me stay up to date on what the team was thinking without getting me sucked into the whole rabbit hole of everything going on in Slack. And that helped keep my weekend pretty clear and calm. And I think that's a huge, huge thing for dots. So what's the overall vibe? If you don't have a dot, I highly recommend you get one, especially if you're in the Chachiputee ecosystem. If you're using Muse or Instinct or GrockBots, you should check it out. I think that they're pretty much at feature parity right now, but there's something really good about having something that's hooked into the entire rest of the ecosystem that you use for your work in your life. There are still rough edges though. The whole permission structure of dots is like completely a mystery to me and is extremely annoying. So for example, I often have to give multiple approvals to my dot to do something basic. And even when I give it approval, it says it can't do it. So they really need to figure that stuff out to make the experience awesome. But I would expect in a year, this is the default way that you're interacting with all your AIs.

You're probably not going to have it be a cute character. That would be my other like little hot take. Mine is named Boo. He's super cute. But my experience using OpenClaws and other named agents like this is that, as soon as something better comes along, you throw away the cute little character you develop. So my guess is I'll be using a persistent agent in a year, but Boo will probably be dead. Rip Boo. We've also actually been working on our own persistent agent. That's not a personal agent, it's a company agent. And that's actually come from this whole journey we've been on, starting with OpenClaws inside of Every and everybody having a personal agent and realizing how valuable it was for the company to have a personal agent. So we built one for ourselves and then we just released it to all of our subscribers. So I brought Willie Williams on our head of platform who was instrumental in bringing the agent to life to talk about personal agents versus company agents, what it's like to build an agent at the frontier right now, and what that means for engineering teams going forward. I hope you enjoy.