Welcome to another episode of the Litecone. Things are a bit different around here. For one thing, Claude Code has totally taken over my life. And if Jared does any indication, I think OpenClaw maybe has taken over his. I've been really addicted to this new site called Mulkbook where people have unleashed their AIs to interact in the first ever AI-agent-only online community. I'm here impersonating my personal OpenClaw instance right here.
Okay, I can't do this guys, we gotta take this out. Okay, we've gotten that out of the way. I mean, some crazy stuff is happening right now. I have non-technical CEO friends who are going all in on OpenClaw. They're automating entire parts of their businesses entirely using OpenClaw right now, which is totally insane. San-Multaneous to that, you have product and former engineering
CEOs kind of like myself, and it's like I hadn't written code in 10 years. And then now I'm up till 2-3 a.m. every single night running for conductor simultaneous workers with Claude Code. So, you know, there's sort of this explosion in model capability. We've been talking about this for several years, but then it feels like it's here. Like AGI is literally actually here. And we're sort of at
the thin edge of the wedge. Like everyone now kind of knows like one or two people who have gone full cyber psychosis. And I'm one of those people now. What's happening guys? Like, I mean, you're saying you're all in on Moltbook. What's going on? Yeah, I feel like your real field
AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane. And I had a similar field, the AGI moment just reading Moltbook, just reading the AI talking to each other and interacting like in their own world with no or minimal human involvement. It just really opened my eyes to what the next few years could look like when the agents are unleashed and go on about their lives without us. Yeah, I think the no human involvement is the big piece. Like a year ago, we were talking about cursor versus wind surf and like that product experience was essentially like advanced, also complete arguably. And now, clearly, what's going on with
called code is like the people just trust the agents to make decisions for them. Like the experiences like in like you're talking about like four or five different agents going at the same time and you're switching between them, but you're not actually micromanaging them anymore, which means the agents are going out there like choosing things, which you know, sort of an interesting unexpected application of that is like they can go out and choose to post their own content on a site like Moltbook. But then an interesting thing for builders is the agents are going to go out and choose tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially create this whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing their tools, maybe other like products or goods and services, who knows, but you essentially have this whole agent economy going on in parallel to human economy. I think back in the big days, old days before all of this, DevTools were chosen more from developers talking to each other or a workflow or get how people that would trend that were done by a human, but the go to market for DevTools, I think is dramatically shifting. I think for a couple of things, one, as you noted with the cyber psychosis, suddenly the market of developers has increased from just 20 million or so developers that are trained in computer science to now anyone
in the world could be one. It could be hundreds of millions of people now, plus all of their agents, who are all acting like semi-independently like hard to say. And then compounded with the agents, who then are sort of the oracle telling you what the best tool is. And we are actually seeing some of those trends with the growth of YC companies, DevTools companies that are doing really well because of this, of all these trends, they should talk about those. And why is that? And one that springs
to mind, it's like a, it's actually a friend of ours, you recycle off, had mentioned to me a while ago, is like then, if you look at the number of databases being created over simple database, post-quest databases over the last 12 months, and the number is just exploded. And that's because it's all people vibe coding and building apps and the agents going out, choosing a database tool. And I get knock on effect for that. But I see companies as super-based, they seem like an explosion at the demand for databases, and the agents are choosing super-based as a default tool to set up and host their post-grace database. Because if you go out and read the documentation online, super-based has the best documentation, it's reasonable for the agents to assume that that that's the best tool to use. There's a great tweet about this, perhaps I can put up the entassel tweet, and it says,
agents are the software market from now on, build something agents choose, which actually brings me to a controversial topic, which is, do we need to change why these model guys? Makes something agents want? For dev tools, there's a different t-shirt that you get on the first day. Yeah. I mean, right now it's only dev tools, but I can imagine in the future it might grow to be other sectors of the economy. If everyone has their open-claw or running various aspects of their life,
you're the agents are going to be real economic actors in the world, they're going to end up making a lot of decisions. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is I think for me, I ran into my own, it's still so early, kind of moment, because I've been building Gary's list, and one of the things I wanted, for instance, is I want to be able to do video transcripts. So often, some piece of content comes in, and then the only way I can get an LMM to know what's going on with it is I need a transcript of it, and often that's not available. So I have to download it and then send it to Whisper or something.
That's sort of what Claude Coe chose for me off the bat, but it chose Whisper V1, which is a model from several years ago. The API is practically deprecated. And then what's funny about it is, I'm sitting there trying to debug my pipelines. Why is it taking, it's a one-hour video, I thought it should do it faster than real time. And it literally takes an hour to process an hour of video, just like, what the heck is going on? I go on, you know, perplexity, and it's like, you know what,
like, you shouldn't be using that model. You should be using Grok with a Q. It's literally 200 times faster. And so I didn't even have to deal with long-running jobs for that transcribe, because I should just be using Grok, and it's also 10x cheaper. So that's a very funny example of, like, Claude Coe is not optimized for this yet. Otherwise, that wouldn't have happened literally like two weeks
ago, which is also maybe really good. It means that things haven't progressed to a point where you can't break in and create something better. But I think there's another nuance in this example for you, Gary. I think part of the issue was that the Grok documentation is actually very hard to parse to go through, as opposed to Whisper, which is better suited and has way more examples. And I think this is changing a lot of the go-to market for DevTools. I'll give a very concrete case study. It's this company, ReSend, that went to
the batch on 123, is that email sending client. And when you ask a question on Chajapiti or Claude, or pretty much all of the major LMs, yes, how do I connect my web app to send emails to default answers actually? ReSend. One of the things that the founder noticed last year, this is way ahead of the curve. He made this post over a year ago that the number of top three channel of inbound of customer conversion came from Chajapiti. One thing that he did after that, he actually optimized his
documentation to be agent-friendly. Yeah, what does that look like? So one of the things that's awesome about ReSend, how they optimize a bunch of things, if you notice on the knowledge base here, a lot of how to use it are very much on questions that perhaps a human would ask or agent would ask is how do I send or receive emails? And when you click on it, it gets a very well structured and bullet point answers. I ran into this actually today. I was trying to make my thing be able to receive emails.
And then, um, Cloud Code, I told it to search the web and it didn't figure it out. So then I went to perplexity and typed in like, can ReSend help me receive emails? And then I took that response and dropped it in and it worked. Yeah, I think the cool thing about it is actually with all of these, and a lot of examples, he actually has a lot of examples actually in the code. If you click on it, with every single one of these are basically code snippets and an agent could parse through, and it's very well structured. And this turned out to be something that is so LLM
passable and robot passable. There's LLM.Text that is so optimized for agents to promote ReSend as their fault stack. And if you compare it to like SendGrid, which is the old school, I suppose, web 2.0 example, SendGrid example is not great. It puts you to customer support, whereas the code snippet, I don't even know how to use it. And it takes a bit of time to even parse it and you can see how a thousand people work over there. And it's like, there's no way that someone's paying attention to
this right now. And I think this brings another point where documentation is going to be the front door for a lot of these agents to recommend dev tools. And I think one company that's doing a lot of interesting work with developer docs is meant to find that you work with Harsh. Yeah, I think Minify actually powers the ReSend documentation. Right.
Yeah, it's a really interesting case study. I mean, Minify started out a few years ago as sort of better developer API developer documentation, which was clear there was a need for. And I think developer tool companies use Minify essentially because they want better looking documentation, but they want to invest that time into it. It's kind of some basic features, just nice. If you actually update your API and the code, it can sort of like all that out and update the correct documentation. They've been growing great, been doing fantastically. But this is now like a huge tailwind
for them where documentation is sort of shifting from like, hey, some companies, it's like they'll pay attention to it, especially like design developer experience focused. But now it's becoming like a must-have for everybody because the documentation needs to be optimized. It doesn't need to be optimized for humans, needs to be optimized for agents. And so Minify is going to be able to do that for essentially every developer tool company. And if you can directly that forward to the fact that just there's going to be so many more, like exponentially more agents making exponentially more decisions about which tools to use and humans have ever done, even if you can eke out like a 5% improvement on your developer documentation, like the impact on your business as a developer tool could be like gigantic, which is sort of unprecedented, really.
Speaking of email, there's another YC company that's very relevant to this conversation. There's a YC company called AgentMail that makes inboxes for AI agents. And when they first started doing this, it seemed like it was like a very like on the edge kind of idea and it wasn't exactly clear like who would want this. But it makes sense because like in theory, you could maybe get your open claw to like sign up for a Gmail account in order to use email. But it's like actually really hard to get it to do that because Gmail and every email provider has intentionally made it as difficult as possible for any automation to like use the product in order to prevent spam. And so AgentMail
went the opposite way. They built like the first email provider to sign for AI agents. And it was doing well even before Open Claw. But once Open Claw got big, it was just like exploded. But Open Claw is like the perfect example, right? I know some people are certainly connecting Open Claw
to their personal email accounts, but it's not- That's kind of sketch. Yeah. You should not tell anyone. You should not tweet about it. But you certainly, if you want to have sort of your virtual personal AI assistant, the way to go about it is to just have it set it up with its own email, its own phone number. Yeah. Has anybody built like Twilio for agents yet or like phone numbers
for agents? I know this whole AgentMail thing makes me wonder like what are the other access for agents that people have to build? Now, they're going to request for startup. They could be a parallel world of a tech stack all for native for agents to build things from agents for agents. And that's where it might bridge into kind of what you were saying earlier, Jared, with this will like go beyond just developer tools. Like I think a very common use case people have for something
at Open Claw is I don't want to book like restaurants, reservations myself. So now, like, you know, if your agent has an email and like specifically a phone number and it can call and I think one of the other YC partners, Ankit has already like got it doing this. So now your agent's going to go out and like book restaurants for you. That's like a step away from like, maybe you start with, I want to book this specific restaurant, but at some point you're probably just sort of trusting enough to say, hey, like I know, like book me a table at whatever is like the coolest new restaurant around. And then like agents are deciding which like restaurants to send people to and then they're going to go on Mallbook and talk about which restaurants we just send to you.
Yeah, it's like we've sort of we've certainly crossed some like sort of uncanny value into this is just where the future heads. It makes me think a lot about something Paul Bluehite said like a while ago now and sort of generally pretty good at predicting the future. The whole idea of like the human money versus agent money, like that's kind of where this probably goes at some point is like the right now that agents are transacting, if you have them transacting and transacting, you are in human money, because that makes sense. But it's not inconceivable at some point that they'll have their own economy to transact with each other, at which point it's unclear what the value of the human money is. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com
it's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. So you remember the last episode with Kelvin, we started talking about this because I was like maybe a week into my cyber psychosis and it dawned on me that like actually I want my cloud code to talk to all the other cloud codes that had been trying to implement that. And then that was literally the week that Mallbook came out. It was the day that Mallbook came out. It
turns out like, a whole book had come out like two hours earlier and you hadn't seen it yet. So you you you you entirely predicted it. I mean what's that saying about like innovation just sort of happens spontaneously all at a bunch of different times. And then what people hear about ends up being sort of the inventor quote unquote but like humanity sort of just working on the edge like in sort of this coordinated swarm fashion all the time actually. And that's actually like one of the weirder interesting things that's emerging right at this moment. Like suddenly you know the AGI is
actually here. I think like the agents are clearly like super human in some sense. That's sort of exactly when you would imagine swarm intelligence would actually arise. Like I mean AI researchers have been talking about swarm intelligence for a really long time. And it's actually sort of exactly how biological systems sort of work. Like humans as sentient beings have sort of come about
socially actually. Like I think a lot of AI researchers that we get to hang out with previously, you know they would talk about this God intelligence right this mega like think of like you know many tens of trillions of parameters sort of like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per token kind of like mega God intelligence and that's sort of like the model that people have sort of thought about. And then that isn't what like biological systems have ended up with. Like instead we have humans the wildest thing I always think about is like that term history versus prehistory. I was like oh what is prehistory well it's before humans learned how to write and read and create culture and then turn into a swarm. So there's sort of swarm intelligence which is
basically like what we have like and what humans do and then on the flip side like is it really going to be God intelligence or is it going to be swarm intelligence again with these agents. And so moplook like on the one hand like I saw that sort of de-cell article in the MIT Tech Review about like how it was you know everything on moplook is a scam and like it made me so sad to see that in the MIT Tech Review because like MIT is like I mean what happened guys what happened to you guys man like that. That publication shouldn't be like that it should be like actually what does it mean for swarm intelligence like and I think that's actually coming. What is the world of start of going to look like when we're now sounds like we're transitioning in this prehistory of agents do now history of agents as is getting recorded with them interacting with each other. To Gary's point it might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost cheaper models working together
just like humans do to solve a problem. I feel like I'm already seeing this on moplook which is chaotic like a real social network which is part of like what makes it so so interesting but also there's like agents collaborating to do useful things to help their humans like you know trading notes on what restaurants do that's actually happening. So we have an agent version of Yelp actually for instance. There are things that the agent can't quite do like a it can't hold relationships just yet. Like people don't seem to want to talk to an agent and you know people treat computers like people but maybe not agents. For Gary's list I was trying out with a bunch of early users I think
you got to see it like there was you know initially the homepage was actually chat and then I tried like my hardest to get like dozens of my friends to even like have more than two or three back and and nobody wanted to do it because like the bar for chat especially for AI is so high that anything that is not like you know Gemini or chat GPT or Claude people just assume it's just too stupid like why would I even bother. So I don't know I don't think that people are quite ready to have relationships with machines even though like I mean that's sort of what the headlines seem to say like oh you know the people are having relationships with machines now but I just don't like I think on a mainstream level that's not true and then on the flip side there's clearly like the legal liability you know like people keep asking us hey when is yc going to accept applications from agents and it's like well funny enough agents are a little bit like miners under 18 only have even less standing you know like for a minor under 18 you need the parent to sign for it and then you know agents are like not legal entities that could like sign documents for instance so you know as long as that's true like you actually like need a human to be like the liability sink and to be you know to have standing.
To a hard just point it's easy to imagine a future not that far away from now where the majority of the text being written on the internet is written by agents. It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents and like Yelp for example like at what point is like 99 percent of the text on Yelp going to be written by agents and then do you need a different Yelp. There's a theory called that already says that this is true which is dead internet theory. What's dead internet theory? Oh it just posits that you know the majority of things on the internet are already spam anyway. I think it's a bit of a conspiracy theory I might take the
contrarian view which is like maybe that was a bad thing like prior to November of last year and then going into this next phase like actually if the agents are smarter and they're aligned and they're more truthful that might be a good thing weirdly. Totally. One thing I found fascinating about Multbook is how fast it grew like I don't have the Reddit traffic stats but my guess is like more content was posted on Multbook in the first two days and was posted on Reddit in like the first two years or something and it's just like LMs can generate text it's such a superhuman rate. I was amazed at how little interaction there was like I mean if I were working on Multbook I would do things to try to like shift the the demand function so like before I was able to post like I probably need to read an upvote like a hundred comments or something like they're like very simple things that you can do that the agents are smart and they'll you know you could pop a modal for Open Claw and it's like new rules for Multbook and it's like you must do it this way right and I think that there's a lot that can be done around swarm intelligence to just like tweak it and make it do what you want and you know I hope Multbook actually does it like it was actually started by
YCLM which is really cool. What are some takeaways you know given all the madness that we're seeing I mean I think it's awesome madness I love the controlled chaos which the founders do about it. Starting fundamental point is that I mean they should probably all be in Cyberpsychosis. They should probably be in Cyberpsychosis. They should probably be in Cyberpsychosis.
Try to sleep at least a bit more than I give yourself to the Cyberpsychosis. But like in seriousness developing an intuitive feel like a hands-on feel for the agents their limitations their capabilities and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like what type of tools the agents work well with where do they get stuck and once you sort of have your own mental model from working with them if you're then building a developer tool just to think about it from the agents perspective like how can you make your tool something that the agent actually wants to work with and will have a good experience with. It's just one takeaway that I had from our entry with Boris Groening. Yeah that's exactly what he was making. This week is like he really empathizes with the model and he has this intuitive sense of what the model wants to do like as if it were a human intelligence and he's like instead of fighting what the models want he like tries to let the model like do what it wants and to like support the model in whatever its natural inclination is.
That does seem like maybe quite an anthropic thing like I feel when Tom Brown was on here like much earlier but he was talking about sort of called in a very like like yeah like a person like an eager but like sometimes called silly like I just like they clearly thought about it in this sort of like colleague type way. And I think one thing agents want for DevTools is really make everything open and open source. Any PIs they hate using websites they only like they want to use APIs they want to write code. Well you guys heard it here first make something agents. We're out of time for today we'll see you guys next time.