John Wang

Co-founder of Assembled (

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

"It's one-shotted my usage limits" - Probably the most hilarious thing I've overhead about Claude Fable 5

[rohan @RohanVasishth]

"The dream is to be the system of record for customer support that really helps you identify how to make it really good."

This week on Skywatch, @getbluejay_ai's car podcast, I sat down with @johnjianwang, co-founder and CTO of @assembledhq, and we had a conversation about what it actually looks like when AI agents meet enterprise customer support at scale, and what most people are still getting wrong.

John did not start out building customer support software. After an MIT roommate steered him toward coding over economics, he finished school early for YC and joined Stripe. There, he and his brother developed an internal system saving millions, only for a PM to prioritize a Bitcoin project instead. That pivot point is what built Assembled.

A few highlights from this conversation I have not stopped thinking about:

👉Although a fully automated experience is ideal, any lapse in service causes customer satisfaction to fall off a cliff, highlighting that knowing exactly when to involve a human is the greatest challenge in customer support AI right now.

👉 While a top-tier human agent might still outperform AI today, the technology excels by delivering what John calls the Chick-fil-A effect, a level of absolute consistency that ensures every customer knows exactly what to expect, every single time.

👉John's analysis of his customer base revealed that 75 to 80 percent of companies implementing AI agents increased their headcount, due to automation driving higher volume, creating more complex support tickets, and requiring long-term change management.

If you are building in customer support, voice, or enterprise AI, this one is worth your time.

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify in the comments!

[WorkOS @WorkOS]

Most people assume AI shrinks support teams. @assembledhq is seeing the opposite: AI makes it so easy to get help that volume explodes. Teams stay flat or grow.

@johnjianwang, co-founder & CTO at Assembled, breaks down the Jevons paradox of customer support at HumanX.

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

In New York this week and thought this was quite symbolic: everyone’s building, the sky is beautiful, but it’s always changing.

Got to see the construction workers next door and our own team make a bunch of progress towards the future

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

IDEs aren’t dead. People are going to realize that the industry will go into a big cycle of focusing on CLIs and the power of them, until eventually you want a better user interface to manage them (whether you’re writing real code or just sending them prompts)

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

@swyx Kind of love @simonw (I think??) just absolutely crushing code here

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

@simonw We only have a few folks using it at our office (and it's usually for our Voice AI teams and quite soft/respectful).

Out of curiosity, do you use voice input for coding agents? I've generally still found typing to be a faster way to communicate thoughts

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

The waymo commute is amazing: your own music, a ostensibly very safe ride, and you can tether / work on laptop without being judged

[Thinking Machines @thinkymachines]

Today Thinking Machines Lab is launching our research blog, Connectionism. Our first blog post is “Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference”

We believe that science is better when shared. Connectionism will cover topics as varied as our research is: from kernel numerics to prompt engineering. Here we share what we are working on and connect with the research community frequently and openly.

The name Connectionism is a throwback to an earlier era of AI; it was the name of the subfield in the 1980s that studied neural networks and their similarity to biological brains.

https://t.co/lrJioBmpbT

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

Overheard at Gophercon: "For a variety of reasons, Go is one of the best languages for automated code generation by LLMs"
- David Soria Parra (Anthropic, co-creator of MCP)

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

The summer SF sunsets are beautiful.

PS This video taken straight out of our SF office. So come join us if you love sunsets and EDM ❤️

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

Pretty hyped for GPT5 tomorrow!

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

Overheard at the office: “I’m going to start tracking the correlation between interview performance and how big their cursor pane is. I honestly think it’s strongly correlated.”

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

This is super exciting -- and particularly impressive that this was achieved without any tool use!

[Alexander Wei @alexwei_]

1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

@calvinfo Very insightful! And crazy that you all launched codex with 8 engineers!!

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

Excited to be speaking at Gophercon in August! I'll be talking about how we use Go to scale up our use of LLMs at Assembled.

If you’re curious how Go holds up in production AI, or just want to argue about it over coffee, come find me!

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

This debug info concept is dope

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

One weird trick to stop and correct hallucinations

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

Kicking off codex jobs on your phone while you’re traveling feels like the future. Small tasks are done pretty seamlessly you don’t need to spin up a whole development environment on your laptop

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

2025 is the year of agents.

[John Wang @johnjianwang]

Whatever your take on China is, it’s interesting to see some top researchers taking up residence there (though hard to tell if it’s a real trend) https://t.co/BZrN6lGOlQ