Prototyping as Leadership: How a CTO Ships with AI Agents — Hursh Agrawal, The Browser Company

AI Engineer · 18 min · 232 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

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00:01[music]
00:13Hi everyone, thanks for coming.
00:16Uh, I'm Hersh Agarwal.
00:17I'm the CTO and co-founder of the browser company, makers of the Arc and Dia browsers.
00:21Uh, and I'm going to talk about prototyping as leadership as you get to a manager schedule, how you can keep building.
00:28So this is my actual calendar from last week.
00:32Uh I imagine this is kind familiar to some of you in leadership.
00:35Um that was my actual week.
00:38I uh have a whole org that reports up into me.
00:40So I have 15 plus recurring meetings a week uh standups, reviews, recruiting meetings, etc. Uh and seven direct reports.
00:48And I've noticed something over the last several months, which is I've started to consistently ship, you know, two to 10 PRs a week.
00:55Uh and this is new.
00:56This was not possible several months ago.
00:58It's really because of these new AI agents.
01:00Uh, and notably, I also have a toddler at home, so I like cannot work 996.
01:04You know, I'm working 40 50 hours a week.
01:06So, I really have to fit all this in into a regular week.
01:11And pre-I agents, uh, as you grew as a leader, you had more of the org reporting to you.
01:17Uh, you would sort of the way you would influence the org was through communicating to people.
01:22Uh so you'd uh write road maps, docs, meetings, and you'd sort of incept uh your context and what you wanted to build with your employees uh and your engineers.
01:34And now, interestingly, in the last few months, as coding agents have become more autonomous and able to handle longer tasks, the manager schedule, as Paul Graham put it, is suddenly
01:44usable as building time.
01:46You can actually ship stuff.
01:48And so I think building is part of the job now.
01:52you can do it first of all as a leader but it's I think it's also becoming necessary as part of the job for two reasons.
02:00First, uh, the technology world is changing where suddenly the core technology that's part of our products are these frontier models that change every 3 months, which is a new dynamic that's come out.
02:11And as each new frontier model comes out, its capabilities change.
02:15The contours of what it's useful for change.
02:17It's, you know, how it actually reacts to prompting changes.
02:21And there's so much noise on Twitter, even internally for us, and so many opinions with each new model release on what's good and what's bad.
02:30And I found it is impossible to tell what a new model is good for unless you have your hands in it and you're using it all day long.
02:37And so having an ability to slot in building time into your schedule means you can figure out the contours of what is this new model family capable of and both how do I direct my engineers
02:48in terms of uh setting expectations on how they should be building but also getting a sense of how does this fit into our product?
02:55How does this fit into our business?
02:56You know how is this how is our strategy going to change because of this?
02:59What's going to happen in three to six months when the open source models catch up?
03:02All of that intuition comes from actually using the models and building.
03:07I've also found even if you've built the intuition, it's actually tough to communicate that to other people who haven't played with the models.
03:14Uh, and so you're like, "Oh, this new thing is possible.
03:17It's going to be amazing."
03:18And your engineers are like, "Okay, yeah, sure."
03:20Um, so it's really helpful to have some time to actually build stuff so you can show them, you know, you can be like, "Hey, I built this prototype with this new model family.
03:28It works in the product.
03:29Here's an actual prototype you can play with."
03:31And this is just so much faster and more efficient than trying to convince people every 3 months when a new model family comes out.
03:39I also think leaders are really well suited for it.
03:41You know, you all have uh context, more context than anybody else uh in the organization about the business, the strategy, the trade-offs, the decisions to be made, what needs to be done, what's uh what's coming up, what are imperatives.
03:54And so the steering of a leader uh as you are prompting these models is to per token uh more impactful than an IC's.
04:02And so you can really fit this into a little bit of time.
04:06The delegation skill also transfers like you delegate to people.
04:10That's sort of one of the core skills of being a leader and that transfers to agents pretty well.
04:14You know it's setting goals, giving context, checking in, even coaching the agent.
04:18You know what if you tried this?
04:19Um, and then I've also found I I think this is maybe specific to now.
04:24Uh, maybe this will change in several months as these models get better, but the models are really good at execution, but still not unbelievable at judgment.
04:32You know, often the model will come back and be like, hey, that algorithm idea is not possible or like I can't do this.
04:37And so you have as a leader have to be like, oh, have you tried this thing?
04:40And the model's like, oh, okay, cool, cool, cool.
04:42I'll try that.
04:42And so it's a really nice dynamic you can have with these models if you have time slotted out for building.
04:48uh that really leverages all the context you have.
04:52So the great Julie Zo had a great tweet about this uh a month ago.
04:56She pulled some Bay Area technical leaders on what can you actually build?
05:00What should you be building in this new world?
05:02And four categories emerged.
05:03Uh you could build internal tools.
05:05So internal efficiency uh quality of life improvements just like gardening around the codebase and the product.
05:10This is really helpful.
05:11Um I really like this.
05:12I learned from this the celebration story.
05:14You can build artifacts to celebrate people on your team.
05:17And then arguably, I think the most important is the vision piece is really playing with the new model families, understanding what's possible viscerally yourself, and then trying to fit that into the business and building products that can show that off to your engineers
05:31so you can really push uh the boundaries of what's possible with the product and business.
05:36I she's right.
05:37I would not take any critical path work.
05:39the last thing you want to do is to have that dependent on you, especially you're going to be dragged into fires and recruiting calls and meetings, etc. Uh so really trying to do one of these four categories is is optimal.
05:50So this is this is my how I work.
05:53Uh and what two to three hours a day of coding can actually look like.
05:57Uh so I usually have a morning coding block about an hour and this is when I look over last night's code, what the uh agent did last night, review it.
06:06I'll talk a little bit more about this.
06:07Uh, and then a few maybe steering blocks throughout the day interspersed between one-on- ones and reviews and meetings and everything else you need to do.
06:14And then the most important block is that 5:00 p.m. block at the end of the day where you really set up whatever overnight run it is you want to run.
06:22And I'll talk about that whether that's coding or training models or whatever you want the agent to do.
06:28I'll go over sort of three examples of tasks you can do.
06:31But really what I found work for me is this one overnight loop.
06:34uh you first in that 5pm block gather context I'll talk about that uh you set up the run you know you get ask answer any clarifying questions uh and then claude code or whatever your coding agent is overnight
06:46does the thing you know does the work for four six eight hours and in the morning you get this beautiful report uh and you figure out what to do with it and then you ship whatever it is so
06:55I'll talk about building features which is sort of the most obvious one uh I found this worked really well with evals and hill climbing so optimizing AI features uh and then a new thing actually in the maybe more recent
07:06uh generations of models is you can have these models train other ML models overnight too and this works really really well.
07:12So building features um the big mindset shift for me that really helped was starting to think about building features not in terms of how do I build this feature and break it up and then give it prompting on how to do the individual task but rather
07:30what is all the context this frontier model needs to be able to make decisions like I would make.
07:36So trying to give it as much context as possible because if it's working for 6 hours, 8 hours overnight, you're not going to be there to steer it.
07:42And so you want it to have as much context as you do about the business goals of whatever you're trying to get it to do.
07:47So, uh, a little tip I found that has worked well for me, um, if you have a co-work agent, whatever your, uh, cloud co-work or codeex or I recommend DIA, I feel like that's the best one.
07:57Not biased at all.
07:58Um, whatever it is that's connected to your Slack and your Jira, Confluence, notion, the repo, etc. Uh, just I before a meeting or something, I'll be like at like 3:00 4 p.m. I'll be like, "Hey, I really want to build this.
08:11go and do like 20 minutes of research and go dig through all of Slack and Notion and everything else and come up with a cloud code prompt that I can post paste into a cloud code and just give me as much context as possible the trade-offs what we tried before what works what doesn't why are we're doing
08:27it what is like the business context of this feature I want to build or this model I want to train and that takes like 30 seconds to whisper flow into DIA or whatever your co-work agent is
08:36and the nice thing is this comes back with a giant prompt that then you can paste into cloud code or cursor or codeex or whatever your coding agent is.
08:44So this is an example of a 5mm prompt I'll have that I give it before I go to bed.
08:49I'll say implement this whole feature and then just paste all of that context I got from my co-work agent.
08:54Uh and then it's important to think about verification.
08:57So as this uh agent is running overnight, you want it to verify how it's doing as it's building and testing the feature.
09:04So first I'll be like hey write the tests first so they capture what you do.
09:07This is really helpful because I I found of decoding agents if you if they write tests afterwards, they're a little sloppish.
09:12Um, and then I'll tell it to test the endto-end flow with computer use.
09:16You know, go around, click around, just make sure the flow works and matches the business context I gave you.
09:21And so the modern models are really good at reasoning about, okay, does this flow actually solve the problem I was trying to solve?
09:28And then uh I usually prompted to do as much work as possible so that when I wake up in the morning, the stack is ready.
09:35So split this into reviewer friendly PRs with clear descriptions, manage CI and get CI green and just make sure you're you're monitoring uh just to make sure the the whole stack is passable.
09:47AI code review is really important.
09:49We have a bunch of internal AI code reviewers uh you know pre the previous talk was talking about codto and other AI code reviewer.
09:56If you don't have any, I would look on Twitter for a bunch of AI code review skills and then just prompt it, hey, once you're done, run this AI code review skill in a clean sub agent, and then fix those things.
10:05And then watch the PRs, fix every bot comment, every, you know, CI check that shows up, any sort of uh anything you need to do, resolve the threads, run this autonomously.
10:14Uh, don't ask me questions, and then I'll like throw in a little encouraging something, you know, be like, you'll do great.
10:20I believe in you.
10:20It's going to be great.
10:21Um, I don't know if that helps or not, but it's it's a I tend to do that.
10:25Uh, and then I tell them I'm going to bed.
10:26Just leave me a report in the morning on what you do.
10:28I need the full stack ready and a report on what trade-offs you made, how you did.
10:31Uh, and it does great.
10:33Uh, it actually modern models, new Opus 4.8 or the new GBT.
10:37They can handle what used to be, you know, weeks of work uh, in one overnight run and you come back in the morning with this uh, beautiful package ready for you.
10:44It actually makes the mornings kind of nice because you have this little present ready for you.
10:49Another example is optimizing AI features.
10:51So, first you're at the AI engineering conference.
10:54I assume you all are familiar with this.
10:56When you first build an LLM call or agent into a into a feature, it's not optimized.
11:01You know, you need to optimize it hill climb on some eval to get the quality, the latency, the cost to where you want it to be.
11:08This is also all doable overnight.
11:10Um, especially with the modern coding agents.
11:12So, uh, usually if I'm prototyping a feature, I will, uh, put a little feedback button on it.
11:18So after the LLM call or the agent runs, I'll be like, "Hey, uh just add a feedback button and a little text box.
11:24And then in one of my 1 hour slots or 30-minut slots throughout the day, I'll just take the time to uh collect a bunch of feedback."
11:30So I'll uh you know, run it a few times, collect a bit of feedback, be like, "Hey, this was bad or this was good or this could have been better."
11:37And then just have it save JSON dumps on my downloads folder.
11:40So it'll save a dump of each of the runs with the system prompt and the inputs and my feedback.
11:46uh and you just collect a handful, you know, like even four, five, 10 are fine.
11:50If you can get some other uh co-workers to run it, that would be great.
11:54Collect like 20 or 30.
11:56And then similarly, uh at 5:00 p.m. when you're setting up an overnight run, uh just say, "Hey, like here are, you know, 10 20 30 feedback JSONs.
12:05This is all the information they have in them.
12:07Turn this into an eval set."
12:09Like just do it locally with SQLite or Markdown or whatever you want.
12:12And then over the next few minutes, talk me through how would you design evals or scoring functions to optimize for this and let's do it interactively.
12:19And then I want you to a build a harness that runs this call against the evals and hill climbs until the score goes up.
12:26Like just do whatever you need to do to get these scores to go up.
12:29And obviously with this kind of thing, if you have such little data, overfitting is a problem.
12:32But even that I found these modern models, you can just tell it to not overfit.
12:36And it actually does a pretty good job.
12:37Uh and to just say don't overfitit, just keep it general.
12:40uh run overnight autonomously until we align on a scoring rubric and then give me a full report uh in the morning.
12:47And then a little tip, it's also nice to just say, "Hey, save this flow as a generic skill so I can reuse it."
12:53Uh and that allows you to improve this flow over time and improve that skill.
12:57And this works actually in the morning.
12:58You wake up to ideally something hill climbed.
13:01Uh and actually when using that feature when we we ship these features to employees to to further dog fooding to production it actually does improve the quality.
13:09You know these are not overfit.
13:11Um and we we use this flow quite a bit internally.
13:13Uh we have an internal code reviewer similar to uh some of the external ones.
13:17And same thing there we add that hill climb to pretty good quality just with these overnight runs.
13:23And then the last example uh and this is again pretty new and really interesting.
13:27uh you can train custom models with this mechanism overnight you know in one night.
13:32So uh this is an example of a modern BERT PII classifier we trained.
13:36We were trying Opus and Haiku for it and it was expensive and latency was not great and we just couldn't get the precision recall to be amazing.
13:43And so uh we collected a bunch of training data and then overnight one night I was like here is a bunch of business context and a bunch of training data we collected.
13:53uh a clean up the training data cloud just bolster it with synthetic data whatever you need to here's a bunch of open AI and enthropic keys uh use an ensemble of frontier models to push the quality
14:04I don't know anything about what ML model will be good here so like you decide you know just give me the best model class give me a few options and in fact train two like don't even train one train two separate ones
14:14uh and then I gave it AWS access I was like give me a provision sandbox do not give it prod that's not a good idea that's how you take prod down
14:20um pick the right GPU and EC2 cluster like train it, test against eval examples, deprovision it, whatever you need to do.
14:26Just give me back the train models.
14:28Uh, and then give me a report in the morning.
14:30And in fact, even put in how I would host this with my codebase on inference once this model is ready.
14:36And again, ask me any clarifying questions.
14:38You can do it.
14:38I believe in you.
14:39You're going to do great.
14:40Uh, and in the morning, just have this ready.
14:42And of course, it works beautifully.
14:44In the morning, you have uh, two ML models trained, a full report, great results.
14:48Uh, and we've, uh, pushed a bunch of these to production.
14:52So those are three examples.
14:54Um I would try try your own.
14:56Uh but I think the main takeaway for me in doing these is really to push on task scope.
15:01So this was a tweet by Simon Lass, one of the notion founders.
15:04Uh and he he called out these modern models are just capable of so much more than we think.
15:10uh and I think it's our jobs as leaders to really understand the contours of how much we can push these models because it affects both how we lead and how we influence our teams but also how they fit into our products and what these our new products are capable of in terms of utility.
15:23So I'd really push you overnight try to think of how do I give it more and more uh scope so that we can do you know weeks of work months of work overnight and see what these models are really capable of.
15:35I will say a caveat a lot of this works because of existing organizational scaffolding.
15:39So you'll have to build this up in your organization.
15:42You know, AI code reviewers, this really helps.
15:44You have an internal one we trained, but also just external ones, whatever you need.
15:48Um, agents.md hygiene, you know, cloud.md, agents.mmd, proper CI that you can trust.
15:54And then we have a bunch of other things like uh really sophisticated feature flags.
15:59Uh, we have a prototype branch that you can push to that goes to employees, but it doesn't go to production.
16:03Just layers like that.
16:05So you're not taking prod down basically as you're prototyping and showing these things off.
16:10Not amazing for the CTO to take prod down.
16:14I will say again code hygiene really matter really matters.
16:16I've been humbled a lot.
16:18You know my code has annoyed engineers.
16:20It's caused sevs.
16:21Uh coding agents are not perfect yet.
16:23So just uh your mileage may vary.
16:25you will get humbled, but I I still think it's worth it uh because you learn so much and you can model what taking on more and more scope even with a busy calendar looks like.
16:34Some tactical tips on hygiene.
16:36Uh I would test everything before the PR goes up.
16:39That morning slot, that's a lot of what I'm doing is just testing what the overnight run did.
16:43Uh even though there's computer use, etc., it's really important you test it yourself.
16:47Um small readable PRs are really helpful.
16:50I think they you're modeling to the rest of the team what good looks like.
16:54So, if you're putting up three 5,000 line PRs, uh, other engineers on the team are going to start doing that, and that's not amazing.
16:59So, uh, it's really important.
17:01Your hygiene is really good because it's modeling for the rest of the team what good looks like.
17:04Um, and then, ooh, this is so tempting.
17:07It's so tempting to put other reviewers on code you haven't read yet.
17:11Don't do it.
17:12It's uh, mostly because you're going to look like an ass because there's going to be something in that code that is going to be so obviously bad and then some senior engineer is going to call you and be like, "Yo,
17:21why didn't you read this?"
17:22So uh I speak from experience.
17:24Read the code, review it properly before you add anybody else to it.
17:29So hopefully this convinces you.
17:31Building is part of the job now.
17:32Uh you can do it uh even with just one or two hours a day and you should uh you'll start to feel the models every 3 months as the new model families come out and you'll learn the skill on how to push scope
17:43as you are uh instructing them.
17:45And you'll be able to show the the the team and the org what's possible as well.
17:49you know, just because you as you have this capability, you'll automatically think of ideas on what to slot in for these overnight runs and then you can model for the team.
17:56Hey, this is what the future looks like.
17:58Thank you.
18:00[applause]
18:15[music]