Anish Acharya
What’s interesting is that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? We’re kind of going in that direction already.
Peter Yang
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.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, it’s a whole new world. I hope more companies stay small. I think the founders of this generation realize that. They want to stay as small as possible.
Peter Yang
Yeah. Instead of having a 10-person product team, you have a 2- or 3-person product team, and instead, a bunch of agents help you.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. Someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now, or something like that. So it’s like, yeah, maybe you lost your job, but now you can actually do your own thing.
Peter Yang
Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it.
Anish Acharya
All right, welcome, everyone. I’ve got my friend Peter Yang here. Peter, welcome.
Peter Yang
Yeah, good to be here. It’s good to see you again.
Anish Acharya
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. I rediscovered Peter through his prolific posts on X and your YouTube channel, and you’ve got a little bit of a Clark Kent–Superman thing going because you still have a day job, right?
Peter Yang
That’s right. I still have a day job.
Anish Acharya
Can you share where?
Peter Yang
Yeah, I work at Roblox as a PM.
Anish Acharya
Amazing—Roblox, an Andreessen portfolio company. One of my favorites. 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 OpenClaw ecosystem. We’re going to talk about coding agents, what students should study, advice, and some of the things that you’ve talked about online.
How many Claws do you have, and what are their names?
Peter Yang
I only have 1. I call her Zoe.
Anish Acharya
Zoe.
Peter Yang
But I have multiple conversations going with her.
Anish Acharya
Okay. And why Zoe?
Peter Yang
I have 2 girls, and I was going to call my younger one Zoe, but I did not. So I call my OpenClaw Zoe instead.
Anish Acharya
I see. This is your fallback plan.
Tell me a little bit about OpenClaw—how you discovered it, how you’re using it today, and what you think the implications are.
Peter Yang
I was lucky to interview Peter Steinberger before he became super famous and the whole thing blew up. Then, rather than just interview him, I set up the thing. It took forever to set up. It was super janky.
It pulls analytics for me across YouTube and my Mercury bank account. It can update Google Docs for me, and it can build little websites for me. But if I’m honest with you, dude, I mostly just talk to it through voice and get voice replies. Every other day, I ask it to give me a pep talk or look through all its memory and give me some deep insights that I don’t know about.
I remember I was on a walk and it gave me a 3-minute pep talk that was really amazing. It was something about how I’m putting all this energy into my creator business and my job, but my kids—some are 4—are going to grow up very soon, and they’re not going to want to spend time with me. So I should really optimize for them instead.
Anish Acharya
Wow. It’s really cool—and I mean, very cool—but it’s also something that all the language models could have done before. So what’s the difference between this and a use case like that?
Peter Yang
That’s a very good question. Because I have it installed on Telegram, it just feels more personal than using Claude or ChatGPT. It feels like something I can text in bed. This is probably not very healthy, but I text it in bed. I just talk to it during my commute, and it feels more like a personal, actual human.
Anish Acharya
So how much of OpenClaw, for you, is about the interface—pushing it to messaging and 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, like self-modification, the skills directory, and everything else?
Peter Yang
I think it’s probably 70–80% just the personal part of it because I mostly just talk to it through voice. But first of all, it is pretty janky. It tends to forget things a lot.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, you have to keep reminding it.
Peter Yang
But any kind of zany idea that I have, I just have to talk to it, and it can probably just do it. The other day, I was doing voice replies with it, and I said, “Hey, can we just have a live phone call instead?”
Anish Acharya
Mhm.
Peter Yang
Then it was like, “Okay, you’ve got to connect Twilio. You’ve got to do all this stuff.” I said, “Okay, fine.” I went off and did it, and then we had a phone call. It called my phone.
Anish Acharya
You have that set up? I’ve been dying to set that up.
Peter Yang
It’s not very good, though. The latency is bad. But the fact that I was able to get it going is pretty impressive. It’s kind of like any crazy idea I have, it can do.
Anish Acharya
And then, in practice, how are you doing that? Are you asking it to write a skill on the fly, or are you discovering a skill? How much of the code generation are you actually using?
Peter Yang
I talk to it in a super casual way, just like a friend. I’ll say, “Hey, can we have a phone call?” And it’s like, “Okay, you’ve got to do all this stuff.” I say, “Okay, fine. I’ll open my computer and do all this stuff.” Then it says, “Give me a call.” We troubleshoot a little bit, and then it works.
With Claude, I have very fancy, very long prompts. But with OpenClaw, I just kind of text it.
Anish Acharya
Really interesting. We touched on a couple of things, actually. One, there’s mobile messaging. There’s the memory system. There’s the code-generation component. How much do you think the memory system—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?
Peter Yang
I think the default memory system is actually not that great. The way I understand it, it works with just a memory.md text file. Then every day it updates.
Anish Acharya
Right.
Peter Yang
I installed this 3-layer memory system that, to be honest, I don’t fully understand. It has Toby’s QMD search tool. I installed that, and then I installed a 2-GB thing. It got a little bit better.
Anish Acharya
That’s fancy.
Peter Yang
But I still have to remind it. I have to put it into the AGENTS.md file: “Before you answer any question for me, go through all your memory and check everything.” It also tends to forget that it can do stuff.
Anish Acharya
Right.
Peter Yang
For example, I’ll ask, “Can you update my Google Doc?” And it’s like, “Oh, I can’t do that.”
Anish Acharya
Yes, you can. It’s in your file.
Peter Yang
So you have to remind it.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. Really interesting.
Well, maybe let’s get into a little bit of the controversy. You’d said that apps will die because it’s going to be everything and everywhere. Talk us through that point of view.
Peter Yang
First of all, I tweet all kinds of random crap that’s not super well thought out.
Anish Acharya
We take it all as fact.
Peter Yang
Yeah. But I do think that, ever since I set up all these apps—Mercury, MCP, and all this kind of crap—on my OpenClaw, I don’t actually open those apps much anymore.
I do agree with you. I think the ones that are going to die first, or maybe get less usage first, are apps that you’re just opening to try to complete a task. You’re actually trying to do something. Apps that you’re opening to get entertainment probably survive a little bit longer. But apps that I’m opening to complete a task—it’s way easier to text my agent to do it for me. It’s like having a really good admin to do stuff for you.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. And how much are you finding this has reduced your smartphone usage, outside of OpenClaw?
Peter Yang
No, because I’m a Twitter addict, so I still use my phone way too much. But in terms of using those apps, it’s definitely reduced it.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, because you’re not going to ask Zoe, “Read my X for me and tell me what’s interesting.”
Peter Yang
It sends me a morning briefing with the top 2 tweets and stuff that’s trending, but I still open X. I look through it.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I’ve always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they want to feel a feeling. I think, of course, there’s some functional set of needs, which is why you open Calendar or something, but I also think that WhatsApp is—you want to feel connected. Slack is—you want to feel productive. And, of course, TikTok is—you want to feel entertained.
So, I do wonder, with just 1 agent, how do you sort of do the context switching of, like, when are you flirting, and when are you getting things done? I mean, in a sense, an app gives you a nice division of the intents. Yeah, that's the part.
Peter Yang
Get with Zoe. That's a good point, but I do have multiple channels set up with Zoe in Telegram. One is just for random voice replies, and the other one is where we're actually working on a project together.
Anish Acharya
Oh.
Peter Yang
And then the other one is a public channel where I'm giving dev demos. I don't want to reveal private information. So, I have multiple channels. Is that implemented as sub-agents, or—no, it's just some janky setup I found online. You can set up multiple Telegram channels, and then I'm not sure if it actually remembers across contexts, across the channels, but you can have separate conversations, at least.
Anish Acharya
Got it. And how transparent are you with your agent? Does it see your personal email?
Peter Yang
I'm super transparent. I did it via the Mac mini—I set up its own email. I gave it read access to my email and calendar, and I also gave it write access to some docs. But it can't scroll through my entire Drive or something, you know?
Anish Acharya
How do you imagine OpenClaw, which is sort of an architectural primitive, gets productized and packaged for the world? I think that's what Peter Steinberger is working on at OpenAI, right? He's probably going to build something into ChatGPT that everybody uses, so that ChatGPT can actually get stuff done for you and maybe feel more human.
Dude, let me rant about ChatGPT for a little. For some reason, they trained the model so that at the end of every conversation it's always like, “If you want, I can also do X and Y.” I got so annoyed by it that it kind of turned me off from ChatGPT.
Anish Acharya
Really?
Peter Yang
Yeah. So, it probably increases their metrics, but it's just super annoying. It's like, why don't you just do it in the first place? Are you a Claude guy now?
Peter Yang
Yeah, I'm a Claude guy now. But I do use Codex to code. You like Codex—you prefer it to Claude Code, or do you use both?
Anish Acharya
Codex is when I want to try to build something real, and Claude Code is when I'm just vibing—vibing. It's very, very vibing, you know. Well, it's interesting. I think they live at different points in a space of trade-offs. I find Claude Code and Opus 4.6 a little more chatty; it makes more assumptions, but it can be more pleasant for a synchronous experience.
Peter Yang
Yeah. Whereas Codex really thinks hard and is more often accurate, but sometimes it's like being in a conversation where the other person pauses for 3 minutes to think. You don't have that flow state, right? It's hard to get into a flow. Claude Code, dude, I tweeted the other day that Claude Code is almost like a slot machine. It has different things each time. It's 100%, dude. It's like a slot machine.
Look, I do think that, if you think back to the old social-networking era, it was variable-schedule rewards, right? That was the whole magic of it. You open your Facebook feed, and once in a while it's boring, boring—oh my God, this is so exciting.
Anish Acharya
And the coding agents have the exact same property. Also, the time is variable: sometimes you get something in 1 second; sometimes it takes 5 minutes. Up to a certain point, I actually think both of those things give it that casino-like feeling.
And the other thing that's very different about the product strategy—or maybe it's just the way it works—is that Claude Code is kind of self-explanatory. With Claude Code, you have all this crazy stuff: hooks, skills, and plugins.
Peter Yang
Like, if you're not following X, you have no idea how to customize this thing. Yeah.
Anish Acharya
But once you customize it, you kind of feel like it's part of you. So, it's kind of hard to—
Peter Yang
It's interesting. I've customized mine because I also read the long thing that Boris put up.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. But I will say that a lot of the reasons I enjoy Claude Code are just harness features. For example, if you copy an image, you have to paste it into a file first and then paste that file into Codex. 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 Claude Code.
Peter Yang
Oh, really? Okay, okay. So, just little things like that, you know. Claude Code added voice. It's a little bit janky right now, but it's going in the right direction. They've just got a bunch of quality-of-life things.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. You know, Claude Code speaks to Claude in Chrome. Codex doesn't speak to Atlas. So, I think these are all things that OpenAI will fix.
Peter Yang
Yeah, I think Codex is actually a much better model, but they don't exist today.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, yeah, they need to fix it. I mean, they're going to go all in on Codex, I'm sure.
Anish Acharya
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?
Peter Yang
Well, first of all, I'm not an engineer, so I'm a novice. But I do hear that—I was talking to some folks the other day at an AI-native startup, and they have a bunch of vibe coders. All the vibe coders are just trying to build internal tools that replace the SaaS they're paying for.
Peter Yang
Really?
Anish Acharya
Yeah. So, this is an actual company that's doing this.
Peter Yang
This is an actual company, yeah. It's an AI-native company. It's one of the vibe-coding companies, one of the more popular ones. Interesting. Yeah, it's interesting.
They're an app-gen company, and they're paying for a bunch of SaaS. They want to get rid of those payments. They want to just build internal tools by using app gen.
Anish Acharya
Okay, so in that case, they might be the most extreme form of adopter, because their own product is app gen, so they should use app gen for everything.
Peter Yang
Yeah, I guess. Is your prediction, though, that the average company will churn off of Slack or Deel or, you know—
Anish Acharya
I don't think so, but some of the other ones are pretty complicated, you know? It's going to be hard to vibe-code that stuff. But I feel like if you have an app like Calendly, or something more simple—
Peter Yang
Yeah. Then why should I pay for it? Why should I pay for it?
Anish Acharya
Well, the counterpoint is that it's not that expensive, and do you really want to maintain your own Calendly thing? Versus paying $20 a month, it always gets updated, it's always up, you know, because there's just a fixed amount of capacity that anyone in the organization is going to have for all this stuff.
Peter Yang
Yeah, that's true. Unless you hire dedicated vibe coders like that startup, it doesn't make sense to just buy stuff. But then it's the cost-benefit versus just paying for Calendly.
It's interesting, for example, that a lot of people are tweeting about Figma. The stock is down—are they going to survive? I feel like the jury's out there; it's kind of hard to say. 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, if you only know how to use Figma, you're probably going to be out of date in a couple of years.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. My counterpoint to that is that I've thought a lot about 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 multi-agent, next-gen IDEs are about trying things and using trial and error as a way to inform your thinking.
A lot of times, I'll just build a feature in a really naive way and hammer the coding agent until it works. Then I'll say, “Hey, write all the things that you would have done differently.” I'll go back to the initial point and redo it.
I wonder—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. I think that's their opportunity to be highly relevant in the new stack.
Peter Yang
Yeah, I totally agree. I think a16z has you guys investing in Pencil or something—Pencil.dev.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, Figma needs to level up its AI tooling, because watching these AI agents collaborate with you and do stuff is very interesting. I know it's top of mind for them. What do you think are the most underdiscussed capabilities of coding agents? What's underhyped, and maybe what's overhyped as well?
Peter Yang
This is probably not underhyped, but I feel like it's interesting that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? We're kind of going in that direction already. I think Lovable recently launched—today, I think—that they can support everything and can make decks.
Yeah, so I feel like everyone is chasing this. I don't know who's probably in the lead, but I don't want to use PowerPoint anymore. I hate writing Google Docs, dude. I feel like I lost my entire life.
The other day I was writing my blog post and instead of typing it out, I was like, “Hey, let me just use Claude Code. Let me give you a bunch of feedback and you write it for me.” Then you just keep improving it. It did the first 80%. The last 20%, I still had to manually go in there and tweak stuff.
That's the way I work now. I never start from zero. I always get the first 80% from AI. It's interesting—there are also historical analogies to this. I think Satya said that Excel is the most powerful, or most popular, programming language in the world.
It's 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 describe and solve problems. I think coding agents are going to be that, of course, times 1,000. 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, and more high leverage to use agents to do it. Yeah, because Excel was popular because it was super approachable, right?
Anish Acharya
Yes. Coding is just—the code is basically gone. It's abstracted away. You're just talking to some agent and getting it to do stuff.
Peter Yang
Yeah, exactly. It's going to be huge. What do you think the future company looks like? Is it just a bunch of agents with a CEO? Is the CEO an agent? What is the role for people in a company in the future?
Anish Acharya
Okay, well, I have some hot takes. We both worked at some companies together. Let me give you a hot take, man: I feel like as a company gets bigger, it tends to become a shittier place to work, dude.
Peter Yang
Yeah, because there's a lot of people you have to align.
Anish Acharya
That's axiomatic, yeah.
Peter Yang
Right? I probably shouldn't mention this company, but I remember our company used to have one of these OKR meetings. Everyone was in a room for 3 hours talking about OKRs, and I'm just like, “Dude, this is a waste of my life.”
So where I'm going with this is that I hope more companies will stay small. I think the founders of this generation realize that. They want to stay as small as possible. Instead of having a 10-person product team, you have a 2- or 3-person product team and a bunch of agents helping you.
Anish Acharya
Because I think it's way easier to course-correct and align with agents than with humans.
Peter Yang
For either of us, you know? It's very objective.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, exactly. One of the things that we've been talking a bunch about is the pro case for AI at work in terms of employee experience. I think it's what you're describing, right? How do you increase the NPS of work?
If we go all the way back—or even broadly, the NPS of the human experience—think of the NPS of the day-to-day human in 10,000 BC, when it's just, “Don't get eaten by the lion,” and that's a good day. Or 100 years ago: “Okay, don't get killed at the factory,” crushed by the steam press or whatever else.
Now a lot of it is just, “Don't get sucked into some high-emotion negotiation with another VP's subordinate,” like a 50-message Slack thread going back and forth.
Peter Yang
Yeah, exactly. Then eventually everyone's like, “I don't want to tell the CEO,” and eventually it goes there, and it's just terrible.
Maybe the future is that a lot of that emotional subjectivity of work gets handled, and we're guiding the process but not in the middle of it in a way that doesn't suit us as humans.
I think the world of a PM creator—and I feel like all the PMs just want to create products. They just want to create products.
Anish Acharya
That's why we all got into it, you know? It's so interesting. Nikhil talks about it all the time, but every PM's view of the ideal PM is the innovator: “I came up with the new thing. I had the big insight, and it unlocked the product.”
Peter Yang
Yeah. I think the black pill is that most PMs don't know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people who know how to do that at all, in any function.
Nonetheless, I think PMs aspire to be able to do that, and they should either do it and be successful, or maybe not be successful and move to a different function. I also feel like, as a hot take, basically all the PMs I know are trying to write code at night and on weekends.
I feel like if you're actually unemployed, you probably have more time to be a builder and to be innovative, to actually play with all this stuff and learn all this stuff. A lot of PMs are just trying to become an engineer on the team.
Anish Acharya
Being a PM is a little more high status.
Peter Yang
Yeah. When I joined Google, I used to be an engineer, and I got sort of—I don't know if I got forced to be a PM, but maybe I also perceived being a PM as a little more high status. But eventually you come around to the other side and you're like, “This is terrible.” You never really get the satisfaction of actually shipping, other than once a quarter when you ship.
Anish Acharya
The PM skills of talking to users and trying to figure out what to do—what problem to solve—are all still very important. But you have to wear multiple hats, too. You have to go build the thing yourself, prototype it, get some feedback, and then maybe bring an engineer along.
How much do you think everyone has to go as fast as—Gary was talking about stims and skipping sleep, and Gary Tan and his gstack. Is that the default way that we all need to work, or do you think there's a trade-off for thoughtfulness?
Peter Yang
I think it's very easy now, with all these AI tools, to go in 10 different directions at once. Sometimes you do have to slow down and try to figure out where you want to go. But I also believe that the traditional process, where you do annual planning and all this bullshit, doesn't really work anymore.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. For the record, I love Gary and think the world of him. I thought a bunch about this. Hiten asked me this the other day, and he's really impressive.
We were talking about this sort of productivity porn, where everybody's got 20 agents running, 20 monitors, and blah, blah, blah. I do think that when it comes to fully realizing a local maximum, you should go very fast.
Let's say you hill-climb and get to the bottom of a new local maximum. With agents, you should be able to get to the top of that hill extremely fast. You have a new insight, and you build everything around the insight so it's fully expressed.
But to get to the next hill, you've probably got to slow down and almost stop, go touch grass, and do whatever. I think this combination of fast and slow is probably the future way.
Peter Yang
Yeah, I think so. You've got to go on that random walk to try to find your product-market fit, which takes us a while, right?
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, which we talked about.
Anish Acharya
Uh-huh. I don't know if the guy intentionally made it the opposite of AI slop, or if it's kind of a—
He intended it to be, I think. Yes.
Peter Yang
That's funny. I have a pretty big public presence, right? So I connect all my accounts to it, and it definitely gives a good peek into what's possible. But right now it's probably still pretty early-stage. It's telling me to run Facebook ads. Why am I running Facebook ads? I don't know.
I'm very excited about it because it does feel like it's a path for more people to build companies, even if they're single-person companies. If you think about how competitive it is to build a billion-dollar business—the markets that support it, and the number of people trying—versus a $100 million, $10 million, or $100,000 TAM, maybe there are pockets all over the country and all over the world where there are opportunities for $100,000 TAM products.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. And that would change somebody's life. That's not an enterprise venture-backed company, but that's okay. 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.
Peter Yang
I want them to just build bootstrapped businesses in high school. They can skip the whole college and corporate life.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. Well, dude, I think this is—for 10 years, there’s been this moral panic about kids wanting to be YouTubers.
Peter Yang
Yeah. You know, you’re a YouTuber.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, yeah, I am. You know, in the vein of MrBeast. I think the pro case for that 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.
Peter Yang
Yeah. So, if you’re an online-native generation and you want to create something but you’re not a programmer, you make a YouTube show.
Anish Acharya
And now you can make a lot more than that. You can build whatever you want.
Peter Yang
Exactly. It’d be very exciting. Any other hot takes for us? I’m curious about your thoughts about this, actually. I feel like a lot of people are saying, “Agents will interact with your product first,” right? And then you see all these great companies building APIs and MCPs.
How do you think about it, with you having been a customer for a while? The customer’s like, “You’ve got to get the user to come back and use your product,” right? But now the user’s like, “Hey, go send the agent to use it.” So how do you think about retention and all this basic stuff? Or even brand equity, because the agent just points to some API? I don’t know.
Anish Acharya
Okay, so I think “I don’t know” is the truth, but I have a few thoughts. One, I think a lot of the sophistication that happened in consumer happened because we had to have indirect monetization. We were never charging consumers directly for these products, which is why you got ads and large-scale networks. We were all obsessed with retention and engagement and whales, and all of these things really, really mattered because we didn’t simply charge people for products.
Peter Yang
Mhm.
Anish Acharya
So I think one big thing that’s really helped in the AI era with that is that consumers are now excited to try new things, are willing to pay, and are willing to pay a really high price point. There’s also consumption revenue in consumer for the first time, like tokens and stuff.
Peter Yang
Yeah, for tokens. You have your subscription plus your tokens.
Anish Acharya
The actual sort of blessing in disguise is that there are real costs as well. You have these inference costs, so you’re like, “Wow, we have to charge our customer on day 1.” I think the business model simplification will really help with a lot of what you’re describing.
Two, I think that a lot of the products will have an API interface for your agents to interact with, or for transactional, sort of rote things.
Peter Yang
Yeah, yeah. And then it’ll have a consumption-based interface as well. You can also imagine a mobile app where there’s the feed, but then you can kind of turn it over to where the wires are. You can just ask for things to get done, or you can see the log of the things that got done. Maybe people will do both, right?
Anish Acharya
I mean, you can imagine Credit Karma, where we worked. When you want to just take a look at your score history and a few other—maybe credit card offers, I don’t know.
Peter Yang
Yeah, yeah. If I get my score, I’ll have all the kind of credit card offers. I’ll definitely do that.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, 100%. Exactly. On the other hand, 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 save?”
Peter Yang
Got it. Got it. Yeah, it’s definitely interesting.
But look, I also just think the whole agent stack is emerging. Identity, payments, marketing—we don’t even know CLI versus MCP. All of these are really new things, and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, it’s a whole new world. In 2025, I thought agents were overhyped, but now I think it’s really kind of coming.
Peter Yang
Me too. I know. It’s just the word is frustrating because it gets so overloaded.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, there are workflows and all this kind of stuff.
Peter Yang
Totally. I’ve been trying to just say, “Can we just say model in a loop?”
Anish Acharya
Yeah, exactly. A model that uses tools in a loop. That’s the best definition.
Peter Yang
Yeah, yeah. But nobody likes to hear that. “Agents” is much flashier, you know?
Anish Acharya
Yeah, it’s flashier. My hope is that all this stuff makes human work more fun—makes your jobs more fun. A lot of people think we’re going to lose our jobs, which is probably what would happen at some point, but I hope all this stuff makes human work more fun.
Peter Yang
Dude, I don’t think we’re all going to lose our jobs. I really think that, and we see this in a lot of companies. We look at a ton of companies, and we’ve seen 2 different buckets.
One bucket is, “Hey, we dramatically increase productivity for a person or a team.” We see this in recruiting. But we couldn’t do 100% of the job. We could do the phone screen, but we couldn’t obviously show the candidate around the office. Or we could do the phone screen, answer all the questions about the company, and even do the comp negotiation, but we couldn’t do the onboarding.
The other style of company we see—which is maybe Decagon or HappyRobot—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. 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 5% is done by humans. It’s still—today, anyway—it’s still humans that do that stuff.
It’s interesting, too, because the buyer looks at that as software—as expensive software. Whereas in the case of something like HappyRobot, Decagon, or Sierra, they look at it as cheap labor. 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 fewer jobs. Maybe we get the European-style 4-day workweek. Maybe companies get 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 these 10,000-plus-person companies laying a lot of people off to, hopefully, more smaller companies, like solopreneurs and stuff like that.
Anish Acharya
Yeah. I think, yes, the shape of the economy is going to change—the amount of concentration—but I just don’t think there are going to be fewer jobs. I think human ambition has no ceiling.
Peter Yang
That’s right.
Anish Acharya
Human desire has no ceiling. 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 need. We’re going to convince ourselves—and, you know, all the new things that you read about every day are these luxuries, peptides. Everybody is going to have all of that stuff, and they’ll want even more.
I saw a really good tweet about this. Someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now, or something.
Peter Yang
Yes. So maybe you lost your job, but now you can actually do your own thing.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it.
Peter Yang
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, awesome, man. Maybe that’s a good positive note to end on.
Anish Acharya
Yeah, that’s a good note. Yeah, cool. Good seeing you, dude. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me.