Jimi Smoot

latent space astronaut, builder of

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

agents are misunderstood and that is the heart of the problem with adoption.

companies expect to replace current employee workflows with agents but ai will always fail at this because the accountability structures within the company won’t allow it.

what do you do when a person messes up? you reprimand them. you have an organization that is designed to correct people issues so this is easy.

but what do you do when you drop an agent into this type of system and the agent makes a mistake? you don’t have the structure in place to resolve the issue so you end up in a failed state that you can’t recover from.

this is what we are seeing is happening in companies.

coding is different because the workflow for code (design, code, review, merge, test) is resilient to mistakes. you don’t generally trust any code from a dev without review/test so the dev portion of the process can be more fungible.

but something like customer service doesn’t really work like this. there is no review step…it’s all live fire.

then there are things like accounting workflows —something i’ve been working on. there is no generally agreed on tooling to handle things like a quarterly close that makes the human fungible. the workflow is usually filled with tribal knowledge and caveats that the agent designer probably didn’t know about.

so really the tools / workflows need to be rebuilt to be ai first then people can adopt agents within the context of the tool. for many companies this will be very hard to do so we will continue to see failed pilots.

the companies that will succeed will have one or more of the following;

1) no existing workflows thus they can tool up and agentify from ground up.

2) the understanding that you can’t replace existing workflows with agents but you can replace new flows with agents.

3) a very strong sponsor who can cram new workflows / tooling down the throat of the organization.

[Indra @IndraVahan]

some intern at mckinsey is probably slopcoating a report on this but let me give you an insider news: most large corps are not happy with the agentic systems & POCs they’ve done this year. 2025 was supposed to be the year of agents. so far it’s been the year of letdowns.

[ib @Indian_Bronson]

This is what software development was before LLMs

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

the g in agi means general.

which means that it will be able to do anything specific.

[Arman Hezarkhani @ArmanHezarkhani]

Vertical AI startups are all going to fail.

It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology and the pace of progress.

Remember Jasper AI? When they were founded, they were on the cutting edge, so they were valuable. But 3 years later and what WAS the cutting edge is no longer even a full feature of an otherwise sellable product.

The way to build a company in 2026 is to orient around the cutting edge. Build a machine to stay on the cutting edge -- or better yet, to push it further.

Every decision we make at @tenex_labs is to optimize toward that.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

@hustle_fred you shouldn’t be cloning anything. you should be building from first principles within the company.

real value for them will be having something that fits the business perfectly.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

@ThePrimeagen create the sickness. own the cure.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

🤯

almost seems like every able body eng needs to drop everything and help @openai and @AnthropicAI to figure this out.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

@rajatsuri but you get to go to parties with cool people.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

i’m reminded of the episode in battlestar galactica where after the homeworld is attacked the surviving humans use ftl to jump away.

after 30 min the cylons find the humans so the humans need to jump again. at which point the cylons find them again after 30 min and they jump again. on and on for a week.

[Jason D. Clinton 🔸 @JasonDClinton]

as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

@wleatherman9 @levelsio do wireguard yourself it’s not that hard.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

@edgarpavlovsky there is no moat in the early days.

this all comes down to your first point though. larpers larp everything including revenue.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

If your company refers to engineers as the IT department, you have nothing to worry about. You were already breached last week.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

no mistakes

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

PSA

> If you don't update everything you are screwed
> If you update everything you will be screwed by the new and more advanced hidden vulnerabilities.

Good luck
Have fun
Don't die

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

praying that critical infra and weapons systems are getting air gapped right now.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

@JasonDClinton @fjajones @timcolbourn @RothRottweiler isn’t the assumption here that nothing new ships (hardware or software)?

software is continuously changing.

and the vibe coding movement is increasing the surface area.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

time to just ship binaries i suppose.

[Vercel Developers @vercel_dev]

Node.js Security Advisory: a high-severity RCE flaw in Node's Brotli decoder affects Node.js 22, 24, and 26.

Vercel WAF rules are live for every project and block known exploit patterns.

https://t.co/JtfEshHnOC

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

unless of course the kids need losses....

[Sashi @sashikantsingh_]

Anthropic plans to give each kid in America portion of its $80B in losses.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

llms make it so easy to write/edit/delete tests that tests are probably useless now.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

allowing your swarm to join a collective to defend against swarms....

cool idea.

[Tyler Hillery @_TylerHillery]

@thdxr Let me enroll my fleet to the cause

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

building the thing that builds the thing is the thing to do in the future.

[Jimi Smoot @jsfour]

"software engineering" today is really just dev ops. i spend most of my day wrangling servers now.

and a small part on architecture.