a16z Podcast - Peter Yang on Small Teams, Coding Agents, and Why Human Ambition Has No Ceiling

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Anish Acharya speaks with Peter Yang, creator and product lead at Roblox, about how personal AI agents are replacing the apps we open every day, why coding agents feel like slot machines, and what happens when the cost of building software drops to near zero. They discuss why future companies will stay radically small, how the IDE is becoming a thinking tool rather than a making tool, and why human ambition will always create more jobs than AI eliminates. Follow Peter Yang on X: https://x.com/petergyang Follow Anish Acharya on X: https://x.com/illscience Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Interesting said software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? And we're kind of going that direction already. The whole agent stack is emerging. Identity, payments, marketing, even CLI versus MCP. All of these are really new things. And I think a lot of the old playbook goes away. Yeah, it's a whole whole new world.

I hope more companies will stay small. And I think the founders of this generation realize that. Like, they want to stay as small as possible. Yeah. And instead of having like a 10% product team, you have like a 2% or 3% product team and just have a bunch of agents to help help. for you. Yeah. Someone tweeted that like the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now.

Yeah. So like it's like, you know, it's like, yeah. So maybe you lost a job, but like now you have to do your own thing. Yeah, 100% and have a shot at actually achieving it. Yeah. Yeah. Most people open their phone to feel something. Connected, productive, entertained. Each app is a door to a different emotional state. In 2007, the iPhone gave us the app grid. 19 years later, billions of people still tap the same colored squares dozens of times a day. The interface became so familiar, it stopped feeling like technology. It became reflex. Now a generation of builders is collapsing that entire grid into a single conversation.

One agent that checks your analytics, updates your documents, runs your errands, and gives you a pep talk on your morning walk. Not because the apps failed, but because talking is faster than tapping. The question is, what happens to products, companies, and careers when building software costs almost nothing. A16Z general partner, Anish Atarya, speaks with Peter Yang, creator and product lead at Roblox. All right, welcome, everyone. I've got my friend Peter Yang here. Peter, welcome. Yeah, quite to be here. It's good to see you again.

Yeah, yeah, it's great to see you. Peter and I worked together at Credit Karma for a brief stint, and then we went our separate ways. and I rediscovered Peter from his prolific posts on X and your YouTube. And you've got a little bit of a Clark Ken Superman thing going because you've still got a day job, right? That's what I said with day job. Yes. Yeah. Can you show where?

Yeah, I work on Roblox as a PM. Amazing Roblox. And Dries and Portfolio Company. Yes. One of my favorites. Well, incredible, man. Let's get right into it. Maybe I'll start with a softball fun question.

And then we're going to talk about everything in the claw ecosystem. We're going to talk about coding agents. We're talking about a little bit about maybe what students should study, advice, and some of the things that you've talked about. online? Yeah, sure. Maybe to start, what is the name of your, well, how many claws do you have and tell me their names? I only have one. I call her Zoe. Zoe? But I have like multiple conversations going with her. Okay. And why Zoe? I have two girls and I was going to call my younger one Zoe and I did not. So I'm not, I call my open clause, Zoe instead. I see. Yes. This is your fallback plan. Peter, tell me a little bit about open claw, how you discovered it, how you're

using it today, and what you think the implications are. Yeah, I was lucky to interview Peter Steinberger before he became super famous and the whole thing blew up. And then right after I interviewed him set up, like, set up, it took forever to set up. It was super janky. And yeah, it does a lot of things for me. It, like, pulls analytics from me across YouTube and, like, memory credit bank account. It can update Google Docums from me. It can build a little web websites for me.

But if I was honest with you, dude, like, I mostly just talk to it through voice and get voice replies. And, like, every other day, I actually do give me, like, a pep talk. Like, look through all your memory and, like, give me some, like, deep insights that I don't know about. Okay. And it gave me like, like, I remember I was on a walk and it gave me like a three-minute pep talk that was like really amazing, really amazing.

It was something about, oh, you're like talking to me about your creator business and blah, blah, and like your job. But just remember that your kids, seven and four are going to grow up very soon and they're going to want to spend time with you. Wow. So you should re-optimized for them instead. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, very cool, but also something that all the language models could have done prior. Yeah. So what's the difference between this in a use case like that? Yeah, that's a very good question. So I don't know. Because I think. on TED telegram, it just feels like more personal than using like Cloud or chat GPT.

And it just feels like something I can text in bed. It's probably not very healthy, but like I text to it in bed. I talk to it during my commute. And it feels like it feels more like a personal like actual human. Yeah. Yeah. So how much for you is OpenClaw about the kind of interface, like pushing it to messaging and maybe helping to trick our brain into feeling like, hey, this is a person or a person-esque thing

versus all the other components of the stack, the self-modifes, The skills directory, all the rest. I think it's probably 80% just the personal part of it. Because I mostly just talk to it and like, you know, through voice. But I also think like is something, first of all, it is pretty janky. It tends to forget things a lot. Yeah. To keep in mind it yet.

But like any kind of zany idea that I have, I just have to talk to it and it can probably just do. It's kind of like, like the other day, I was doing voice replies with it. I was like, hey, can we just have a live phone call instead? And then it's like, okay, you got to connect Twitter, too, you got to do all the stuff. And then, okay, fine. I went off and did it. And then we had a phone call. It called my phone.

Oh, really? You have that set up. I've been dying to set that up. It's not very good, though. Like, the latency is bad. But the fact that I was able to get it going is, like, pretty impressive. So it's kind of like any kind of crazy idea I have, it can kind of do. And then in practice, how are you doing that?

Are you asking it to write a skill on the fly? Are you discovering a skill? How much of the code gen are you actually using? I mean, I talked to him super casual way with like just like a friend. So I'm like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, so you can have a phone call? Yeah, okay, you got to do that. I'll open my computer. I'll do all this stuff, and then it's like,

give me a call, and I would troubles you a little bit, and then it works. So with cloud, I have like very fan-fancy prompts, like very long prompts, but with open cloud, I just kind of text it. Yeah, it is really interesting. So we sort of touch on a couple things, actually. So one, there's mobile messaging,

there's the memory system, there's the sort of code generation component. How much do you think the memory system, like, is it innovative because it's file-based? You said that it forgets things, but so do language models? Do you think the memory system is well done? Does it hold it back?

or does it enable it? I think the default memory system is actually not that great. Okay. Like, the way I understand it works is just like a memory dot MD text file. Yes. And every day. Per day, right? And every day it updates.

And it tends to forget things a lot. Yeah. So I actually installed this like three-layer memory system that to me and I don't fully understand. But it has like, it has like Toby's QMD search tool. Okay. So I installed that. And then it installed like a two gigabyte thing. And then it got a little bit better.

Okay. But I set to remind it, I have this, I think putting into the agents like MD. hey, like, before you answer any question from me, go through all your memory and check everything. Yeah. And it also tends to forget that it can do stuff. Like, can you update my Google Doc. Oh, I can't do that.

Yeah, yes, you can. It's in your file. Yes, yeah. So you have to remind it. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. Well, maybe let's get into a little bit of the controversy. You'd said that Absal die,

claw is going to be everything and everywhere. I mean, talk us through that point of view. Yeah, well, first of all, I tweet all kinds of random crap. That's not super well thought out. We take it all as fact. Yeah. Yes. But I do think, like, ever since I set up all these,

apps like Mercury, MCP and all this kind of crap on my OpenCla. Like, I don't actually open those apps much anymore. But I do agree with you. Like, I think the ones that are going to die first or like maybe get less usage first is like apps that you're just opening to try to complete a task. Like you actually try to do something. You know, like apps that you're opening to get entertainment can probably survive a little bit longer.

But like apps and opening to complete a task, like it's just way you should text my agent to do it for me. Yeah. It's like you have a really good admin. It's a do stuff for it for you. Yeah. Yeah. And so how much are you finding?

And has this reduced your smartphone usage outside of Modulo OpenCla? Yeah, no, because I'm like a Twitter ad addict. So I used this phone way too much. But yeah, in terms of using those apps, it's definitely reduced it. Yeah. Yeah, because you're not going to ask, Zoe, hey, read my acts for me and tell me what's interesting. I mean, it sends me like a morning briefing with the top two tweets and stuff, the like trends. But yeah, I still open X.

I look through it. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because I've always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they want to feel a feeling. Yeah. And I think, of course, there's some like functional set of needs, which is why you open calendar or something, but I also think that WhatsApp is you want to feel connected and Slack is you want to feel productive and of course TikTok is you want to feel entertained.

So I do wonder with just one agent, how do you sort of do the context switching of like, when are you flirting, when are you getting shit done? I mean, in a sense app gives you a nice, it sort of gives you a nice division of the intent that you don't get with Zoe. That's a good point. But I do have multiple channels set up with Zoe in Telegram. Like one is just to random voice replies. and otherwise we're actually working on our project together.

And then I don't want to have a public channel where I'm giving debt demos. I don't want to review private information. Yes, so I have multiple channels. And is that implemented as sub-agents or? No, is this some janky setup I found online? Like, you can set up multiple telegram channels. And then I'm not sure if you actually remembers across context across the channels, but like you can have separate conversations at least.

Got it. Yeah. And how transparent are you with your agent? Does it do this year a personal email? Yeah. I'm like super transparent. I did buy the MacMani and set up its own email. Okay.

But I gave it like read access to my email and like calendar. And I also gave it like right access to some docs. Yeah. But it can't screw my entire drive or something. Yeah. So how do you imagine OpenClaught, which it's sort of an architecture and a primitive? Yeah. How does it get productized packaged for the world?

I mean, I think that's what Peter Steinberg is working now at OpenEye, right? Yeah. He's probably going to build something to chat GPT, which every uses so that chat GPU can actually get stuff done for you and maybe feels more human. Yeah. Dude, let me rant about chat. You people. Please.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For some reason, they trained the model so that at the end of every conversation is always, if you want, I can also do X and Y. Yeah. And dude, I got so annoyed about it that I kind of churn from chat GPT. Oh, really? Yeah. So it probably increases their metrics, but it's just like super annoying.

It's like, why don't just do it in the first place? Are you a quad guy now? Yeah, I'm a clock guy now. But I either use Kodex to code. Yeah. Yeah. You like KodX? You prefer it to cod code or you use both?

Kodes, when I want to try to do something real, and CloudCode is just like vibrating. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I think they live at different points. And there's a sort of space of tradeoffs. Yeah. Whereas I find Quad Code in Opus 4-6, it's a little more chatty. It makes more assumptions, but it can be more pleasant for a synchronous experience.

Yeah. Whereas Codex, it really thinks hard and it's more often accurate. But sometimes it's sort of like being in a conversation where the other person pauses for three minutes to think. Yeah. So you don't have to flow state, right? It's hard to get it flow. Like, like, dude, I tweet there are day, clock one. It feels like a slob machine.

It has different things each time. Oh, 100%. It's like a slum machine. Look, I do think that if you think, remember we were talking about in the old social networking era, it was variable scheduled rewards. Right. That was the whole magic of it. Like you open your Facebook feed and once in a while it's like boring, boring.

Oh my God, this is so exciting. And the coding agents have the exact same property. Also, the time is variable. So sometimes you get something in a second. Sometimes it takes five minutes. So up to a certain point, I actually think that both of those things give it that casino-like feeling. Yeah.

And then I think that's very different. about the product strategy or maybe it's just the way it works. It's like coding is kind of like self-examatory. And ClockCode, you have all this crazy shit. You have like hooks and like skills and plug-ins. If you're not following twist. Yeah. If you're not following X, you have no idea how to customize this thing.

Yeah. But once you customize it, you kind of feel like it's part of you. So it's kind of hard to turn. It's interesting with, so I've customized mine because also I read the long thing that Boris put up. Yeah. But I will say that I think that cloud code, a lot of the reasons that I enjoy it are just harness features.

Like, for example, if you, if you, you cut an image, you have to paste it into a file and then paste that file into Codex. Okay. You can't just take a subset of the screen, screenshot it, and then paste it directly into Codex the same way you can with CloudCode. Oh, really? Okay, okay, okay. So just like little things like that.

Clod code added voice. It's a little bit janky right now, but it's going in the right direction. So they've just got a bunch of quality of life things. Yeah. Quad code speaks to Clod in Chrome. Okay. And Codex doesn't speak to Atlas. Got it.

So I think these are all things that OpenA I will fix. Yeah. I think Codex is actually a much better model. but they don't exist today. Yeah, yeah, they need to fix it. I mean, they're going to go all lying on Codex, I'm sure. Yeah. Talk to me about coding agents.

What's your general view? Do you think it's the end of SaaS? Do you think these are just a toy? Well, first of all, I'm like not an engineer, so I'm like a novice. But I do hear that, like I was talking some folks the other day and AI Native Star startup, and they're basically trying to have a bunch of vibe coders. And all the vibecors are just trying to build internal tools that replace their SaaS that they're paying for. Really?

So it's an actual company that's doing this. It's an actual company. It's an AI native company. It's like one of the bi-ocoding companies, one of the more popular ones. Interesting. Yeah. It's interesting.

Oh, I see. So they're actually an Appgen company. They're an appgen company, and they're paying for a bunch of SaaS. They want to get rid of the payment. They want to just buy app coding internal tools. By using it. Okay. So in that case, they might be the most extreme form of adopter because their own product is

Appgen, so they should use AppGen for everything. Yeah. I guess is your prediction, though, that the average company will churn off of Slack or deal or, I don't think. I feel like Slack has a lot of legs because Slack can also. be the place where you talk to the agents themselves. But some of the other ones, they are pretty complicated. So it's kind of hard to buy that kind of stuff.

But I feel if you have an app like maybe Calendly or something more simple, then why should I pay for it? Why should I pay for it? The counterpoint is that it's not that expensive. And do you really want to maintain your own calendar thing? Yeah. Versus pay $20 a month. It always gets updated.

It's always up. Yeah, yeah. Because there's just like a fixed amount of capacity that anyone in the organization is going to have for all this stuff. Yeah, that's true. unless you hire like dedicated vibecordes like the startup does. I just want to the vibe cool stuff. But then it's the cost benefit versus just paying for Calently.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting about, for example, like a lot of people are tweeting about Figma. Yeah. It'll stock us down and like, you know, are you going to survive? Yeah. And I feel like the jury is out there. It's kind of hard to say.

Yeah. I feel like all the designers are still on Figma, but as a designer, you kind of need to learn how to vibe code. Otherwise you're going to, if you're only not to do Figma, yeah. You're probably going to be like out of date in a couple years. Yeah. My counterpoint to that is that I think that I've thought a lot about the sort of thinking tools versus making tools, right?

The IDE was historically a making tool. It's a place for execution. I think it's migrating away from that. And now with execution going to zero, I think these sort of like multi-agent next-gen edes, a lot of them are about trying things and using the trial and error as a way to inform your thinking. Like a lot of times I'll just build a feature in a really naive way and I'll hammer the coding agent until it works.

Then I'll say, hey, write all the things that you would have done differently. And I'll go back to the initial point and redo it. So I wonder if, and I think Figma actually does both. I think it's a place for design execution, but it's also an important place for design thinking. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's their opportunity to be highly relevant in the new stack. Yeah, I totally agree.

I totally agree. But I think A16Z has like you guys investing pencil or something, pencil. com. Speed run did, yeah. Yeah, Speed run. And yeah, Figma needs to like level up its AI tooling because like watching these agents clare with you and do stuff is like very interesting. I know it's top of mind for them.

Yeah. What do you think are the most under-discussed capabilities of coding agents? What's under-hyped and maybe what's over-hyped as well? This is probably not under-hyped. But I feel like entrances that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? And we're kind of going that direction already. Like I think Lovol recently launched today.

Yeah. They can support everything and Replic can make decks. Yeah. So, yeah. And I feel like everyone is chasing this. And I'm probably in the lead. Yeah. I don't want to use PowerPoint anymore.

I don't want to write a Google. I hate writing Google Docs, dude. cost my entire life. So like the other day, I was running my blog post, and instead of just like typing it out, I was like, hey, let me just use clock code and let me give you a bunch of feedback, and you write it for me.

Yeah. And you just keep the opening the first 80%, the last 20% I said to Maui going there, like, tweet, take stuff. Yeah. But like, that's the way I work now. I never start from zero. Like, I always get the first 80% from AI.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at, there are also like historical analogs of this. I think Satya said this,

which is that Excel is the most, powerful or most popular programming language in the world. Yeah. And that it's sort of a programming language that millions and millions, I mean, 100 million plus people must know, maybe even more. And yet we don't think of it that way. It's a way to sort of describe and solve problems. Yeah. And I think coding agents are going to be that, of course, times a thousand. Yeah. Where even things that feel subjective, like writing Google Docs can be represented in the coding domain in such a way that it's more satisfying, more productive, more high leverage to use agents to do it. Yeah, because Excel was like

popular because it's super approachable, right? Yeah. And, like, coding agents, the code is basically gone. It's like, I'm upshot away. You're just talking to some agent and getting to do stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's something huge, huge. Yeah.

What do you think the future company looks like? Is it just a bunch of agents with a CEO? Is the CEO an agent? I mean, what is the role for people in a company in the future? Okay, well, I have some hot take. So we both work to add some companies together and let me give you a hot take, man. Maybe we cut this out. But I feel like as a company gets bigger, it tends to become like a shitty,

it tends to become like a shittier place to work, dude. Yeah. Because there's a lot of people, you have to align. I think that's axiomatic, yeah. Right? And I remember at, maybe I should mention this comment, but I remember in our company, you know, a company, we used to have all these like OKR meetings

and I'm just sitting in a room for three hours talking about OKRs. I'm just like, dude, this is like waste of my life. Yeah. So what I'm going of this is, I hope more companies will stay small. And I think the founders of this generation realize that. Like, they want to stay as small as possible. Yeah. And instead of having a 10% product team, you have a two or three person product team,

and I have just have a bunch of agents to help you. Yeah. I think it's way easier to cross-launch the line of the agents than with humans. Yeah, well, actually, in a sense, the agents actually, because it takes the emotion out of it, too. Like, you can imagine if I sent my agent, you sent your agent to go negotiate something. Yeah. And they came out with some conclusion, it's not emotional. It's not for either of us.

It's very objective. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's funny. One of the things that we've been talking a bunch about is what is the pro case for AI at work in terms of employee experience? And I think it's what you're describing, right? Like, how do you increase the NPS of work? Yeah. So if we go all the way back, or even broadly the NPS of the human experience, right?

Think of the NPS of the day-to-day human in 10,000 BC. Just don't get eaten by the line. And that's a good good day, right? Or maybe 100 years ago, it's like, okay, don't get killed at the factory. Crushed by the steam press or whatever else. And now a lot of it is like just don't get sucked into some high emotion, sort of negotiation with another VP's subordinate. Yeah, like a 50 messages of slack three going back on board.

Yeah, exactly. And then eventually everyone's like, I don't want to tell the CEO. and eventually it goes there, and it's just terrible. So maybe the future of this is that a lot of that emotional, subjective work gets handled. And we're sort of guiding the process, but not in the middle of it in a way that just doesn't suit us as humans. Yeah, I leave that double life as a PM creator. And I feel like all the PMs actually just want to create products. Yeah, because I want to create products.

Well, that's why we all got into it. It's so interesting. I mean, Nikkel talks about the whole time, but like every PM's sort of view of the ideal PM is the innovator. Like, I came up with the new thing. and it had the big insight and it unlocked the product. I think the black pill is, I don't think most PMs know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people that know how to do that at all in any function. So nonetheless, I think PMs aspire to be able to do that,

and they should either do it and either be successful or maybe not successful and move to a different function. I also feel like my hot take is like basically all the PMs I know are trying to vibe code at nice and weekends. Yeah. And I feel like my hot take is that I feel like if you're actually unemployed, like you probably have more time to be a builder. and like to be innovative.

You can actually like play all this stuff and learn all the stuff. What of PMs are trying. Or maybe being an engineer in the team. Yeah. I used to be an engineer and I got sort of, I don't know if I got forced to be a PM. Maybe I also perceived PM as like being a little more high status

when I joined Google. But then eventually you come around on the other side. You're like, this is terrible. Yeah, yeah. Like you never really get the satisfaction of actually shipping other than once a quarter when you ship. I mean, the PM skills of talking to users and like trying to figure out what they deal,

like what the problem to solve. Like those are very important still. Yeah. But yeah, you've got to wear multiple hats to do. Like a computer thing yourself, could prototype it, and get some feedback and then maybe brand engineer a lot.

How much do you think that everyone has to go as fast as, I mean, like Gary was talking about stimmies and skipping sleep and D-10 G-stack? I mean, is it, hey, I mean, is that like the default way that we all need to work?

Or do you think there's a trade-off for thoughtfulness? I think it's very easy now with all these AI tools, just going like 10 different directions at once. Yeah. So sometimes you do have to slow down and try to figure out where you want to go. Yeah.

But I also believe that the traditional process where, like, do annual planning and do all this bullshit. I just feel like that's fully realizing a local, a sort of local maxima, you should go very fast, right? So let's say you kind of hill climb, you get to the bottom of the new local maxima. I think with agents, you should be able to get to the top of that hill extremely fast, right? You have a new insight, build everything around the insight,

so it's fully expressed. But then I think to get to the next, the next sort of hill, should have like fast and slow. That's probably the future way. Yeah, I think so. And like, you got got that. random walk trying to find hard market fit, which takes us a while, right? Yes.

So we were talking before we started recording about some of the business in a box platforms. Have you looked at them? Do you have a view? I've looked at post yet that we talked about. I don't know the guy like intentionally made it the opposite of AI slot or is it kind of a I think so. Yes. Yes.

That's funny. Well, I mean, I have a pretty big public presence, right? So I connect all my shit to it. And then, I mean, it definitely gives a good peek into what's possible. But like right now is probably still pretty like early. stage. Like, it's time you to run, like, say, Facebook ass. Why am I running Facebook gas? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

I mean, I'm very excited about it because it does feel like it's a path for more people to build companies. Yeah. Even if they're single one-person companies, if you think about how competitive it is to build a billion dollar business, like the markets that support it, the number of people trying versus 100 million versus $10 million versus $100,000

Tam. Yeah. Like maybe there are these pockets all over the country, all over the world where there are opportunities for $100,000 Tam products. And that would change somebody's life. Now, that's not an enterprise venture-backed company, but that's okay. So I hope that whole thesis works, because I do think it's a way to get more people to participate. That's my plan for my kids, dude. I want them to just build like a push-shot businesses in high school. Yeah. And they can skip the whole college and

corporate life. Yeah. Well, dude, I think this is for 10 years, there's this moral panic about the kids want to be YouTubers. Yeah. You're a YouTuber and in the vein of Mr. Beast. I think the pro case for that actually is that the kids wanted to be entrepreneurs or have agency and the only channel for people if they weren't programmers was creating YouTube videos, at least online. Yeah. So if you're like an online native generation, you want to create something you're not a programmer, you make a YouTube show.

Now you can make a lot more than that. Yeah, you can be wherever you want. Exactly. So exactly. You'd be very exciting. Yeah. Any other hot takes for us? I'm curious about your thoughts about this, actually.

So I feel like a lot of people are saying, like, agents will interact with your product first, right? And then you see all those great companies like building like APIs and MCPs. Mm-hmm. But how do you think about you being consumer for a while? So, like, the consumer is, you've got to get the user to come back and use your product, right? Yeah, but now the users is like, hey, go send the agent to use it.

So how do you think about retention and all this basic stuff? Or even like brand equity, because the agents just like point some API. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, so we had to have indirect monetization. Okay, like we just, we're never charging consumers directly for these products, which is why you got ads and stuff. Add. It's in just large-scale networks, and we all obsessed with retention and engagement.

and whales and all of these things really mattered because we didn't simply charge people for products. So I think one big thing that's actually really helped in the AI era with that is that consumers are now excited to try new things, they're willing to pay, they're willing to pay a really high price point. There's also consumption revenue and consumer for the first time.

Like tokens and stuff? Yeah, like tokens. You have your subscription plus your token. And then the actual like the sort of blessing in disguise is that there are real costs as well. You have this inference costs. So you're like, wow, we have to charge our customer on day one. So I think one thing is that like the business model simplification, I think will really help with a lot of what you're describing.

Two, I think that a lot of the products will have a sort of, it'll have an API interface for your agency interact with or for transactional sort of wrote things. Yeah, yeah. And then it'll have a consumption-based interface as well. So you can also imagine like a mobile app or there's like the feed, but then you can kind of turn it over to where the wires are. And you can just ask for things to get done or you can just see the log of the things that got done. Yeah, maybe people will do both, right? I mean, you can imagine credit karma where we work. Once in a while, you want to just take a look at your score history

and a few other maybe credit card offers. I don't know. I mean, if I think my score with all the kind of credit card offers, I'll definitely do that. Yeah, 100%. Exactly. On the other hand, like, sometimes you want to just be like, yo, can you just fix all my stuff?

Or what stuff did you fix this week? How much money did I say? Yeah, yeah, got it. Yeah. It's definitely interesting, yeah. But look, I also just think the whole agent stack is emerging. Yeah. Identity, payments, marketing.

We don't even CLA versus MCP. And like, all of these are really new things. and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away. Yeah, it's a whole new world. And like in 2025, I thought Agents was overhyped, but now I think it's really kind of coming. Me too. I know.

It's just the word is frustrating because it gets so overloaded. Yeah, there's like workflows, like all this kind of shit. Totally. I've been trying to just say, can we just say like model in a loop? Yeah, exactly. Model that used tools in a loop. That's the best definition. Yeah, yeah.

But nobody likes to hear that. It's like, Asians is as much flashier. Yeah, it's faster. Yeah. My hope is that all this stuff, like a lot of people think we're going to lose our jobs. It was probably what would happen at some point. But I hope all this stuff just makes the human work more fun. Like, our job's more fun.

Dude, I don't think we're all going on those are jobs. I really think, and we see this a lot of companies. So we look at a ton of companies, and we've seen two different buckets. So one bucket is, hey, we dramatically increase productivity for a person or a team. We see this in, like, recruiting. But we couldn't do 100% of the job. So we could do the phone screen, but we couldn't obviously show the candidate around the office. Or we could do the phone screen and we can answer all the questions about the company

and we can even do the like comp negotiation, but we couldn't do the onboarding. Yeah. The other style of company, which we see, which is maybe a Decagon, right, or a happy robot, is, hey, we did 100% of a job like customer support. The customer called in, they had a question, we hopefully resolved their query, and then that's it.

And that is 100% automated. I'd say that second group where you have 100% automation of a job function is really rare. Almost every AI product, AI Native X or Y, we see, is able to provide dramatic lift, but it's not able to do 100%. So the last time percent of Stony is humans. Yeah, it's still, today, anyway, it's still humans that do that stuff.

And it's interesting, too, because the buyer looks at that as software, as expensive software, whereas in the case of something like a happy robot docking on Sierra, they look at it as, like, cheap labor. So I do think there's a different buyer mindset, but because there's been this difficulty of getting to 100% automation, I think a lot of the efficiency gain shows up in just a different way, probably not less jobs. Maybe we get like the European-style four-day work week. Maybe companies get like twice as productive. I have no idea. Yeah.

But you don't think that. I feel like there's going to be a transition from like these like 10,000 plus people companies laying a lot of people off to hopefully like more smaller companies like solopreneurs and stuff like that. I think, yes, I think that the sort of shape of the economy is going to change, like the amount of concentration. But I just don't think there's going to be less jobs. I think human ambition has no ceiling.

That's true. Human desire has no ceiling. And just read any mildly interesting science fiction book. There's no way this is the peak expression of all the stuff that we want and we need and we're going to convince ourselves. and all the new things that you read about every day is these luxuries, peptides, and everybody's going to have all of that stuff

and want even more. You know, dude, I saw a really good tweet about this. Like, someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now or something like that. Yeah, so maybe you lost a job, but now you can actually do your own thing. Yeah, 100%. And have a shot at actually achieving it.

Cool. Well, awesome, man. Maybe that's a good positive note to end on. Yeah, that's a good note. Yeah. Cool. Good thing you do. Thanks, Peter.

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