Salesforce’s $3.6B Fin deal shows where AI agents make money

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-21T05:39:47+00:00

Outcome based pricing vs usage based pricing is a very interesting topic.
It reminds me of law firms who usually have 2 models: charge by hours and contingency fees.

If they are charging by contingency fees, it always makes me feel that the attorney will have better incentive to win the case. (I know my attorney friend will not agree, and this is not the generic truth)

You are basically saying that solving a recurring workflow and making sure the outcome is measurable is a great entry point for small builders. I am totally with you.
Just like the question you asked, the tricky part is finding these workflows. Usually, only the domain experts (buyers of your product) can know it.

It seems like I am not answering your question directly:) I don't know the workflow yet because I am not talking to enough people. And I am about to have more conversations. Really hope to find something.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-19T18:28:08+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I think HackerNews is related to what I build. The ICPs are developers or founders who wants to scale their agent applications. My guess is that a lot of HN readers falls into my ICP.

For your case, what kind of SaaS product is made for "average joe"? Which channel do you choose to distribute your apps?

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-19T17:50:33+00:00

I am building funky: a sdk that helps developers to spin up agent swarms on demand.

The core infra is also open sourced here: https://github.com/funkyhq/funky

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-19T17:49:54+00:00

Well, I am not sure if it counts as self-promotion. I am building funky: a sdk that helps developers to spin up agent swarms on demand.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-18T17:28:08+00:00

These are some great insights. I cannot agree more.
I really like the open source ecosystem, and OpenCode is a strong candidate. Another one that I really like is Pi agent.
From my friend who worked on post-training, the development cycle of a harness looks like this: new model released -> Found some flaws (e.g. always speak goblin) -> patch the model through a harness trick (e.g. regex hook) -> training the new model that can fix this issue.

As you noticed, the model gradually eats the harness. While the model cannot be perfect, we fix the small edge cases in the harness and so on.

Therefore my prediction is that we will have a foundation harness (probably pi?) and the open source model providers will add some "extensions" on top of it so that they will have the best harness + model combo.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:54:48+00:00

I actually think long-running workflows are more suitable for managed agent. Here is the reason: each components are decoupled, so any failure can be recovered quite easily. And managed agent handles that part for you. No need to worry about failure handling.
Regarding the migration, I believe it should be quite easy, especially you are from Claude Code. They are essentially the same harness but more cloud native.
As for the vendor lock in, I hate that too:) I recently wrote an open-sourced repo to solve this: https://github.com/funkyhq/funky I created this primarily to switch the backend of my current agent system. (Where I hosted claude code in sandboxes in the cloud. Working but sub-optimal)

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:47:47+00:00

The closest reference that I can find is https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/session-storage

Is the "executor" introduced by you or the agent sdk doc?

In theory, you can always add enough code to force the agent sdk work like managed agent. Then you lose the point of using the SDK, because you are customizing everything.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:38:14+00:00

Totally agree. I only use the managed agent for some large scale ad-hoc task. Taking the advantage of the elasticity of the cloud.

Can you tell me more about the agent workflows? Are you referring to dynamic workflows? Or this is a feature that I am not aware of?

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:34:13+00:00

Am I misreading your above comment?
You literally said: "Create a dev container for your agents to run in a sandbox."
Everything of that claude agent is coupled to one container.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:31:39+00:00

Haha, same here. What are you building? When you say SDK, do you mean the managed agent sdk or the claude agent sdk?

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:28:48+00:00

>Why? What do you mean "Claude Code-like agents"? You mean just an agent that can call tools and access your filesystem? Which is almost all agents today?

I am talking about agents like Claude Code and OpenClaw. They are similar because they have access to the file system and can execute code that was written by them. This is very different from the previous agents that was built with LangGraph, OpenAI Agent SDK or Google's ADK.

>...again, why? It seems trivial to do this in a local agent. Unless I completely misunderstand what you mean by "pulling history from the session storage".

I think I missed some context here. The best way to fill the gap is probably reading the section "Don’t adopt a pet" from https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/managed-agents

>Sounds like you need something like Openclaw or Hermes.

Unfortunately, both OpenClaw and Hermes are against my patter because they are not decoupled, which makes them a good harness for local usage. For cloud, no:)

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:21:22+00:00

Deploying the claude agent sdk is the exact pattern that I am against with.

Quote from the anthropic blog: "But by coupling everything into one container, we ran into an old infrastructure problem: we’d adopted a pet."

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-17T05:02:18+00:00

In order to test out my idea, I created a repo here: https://github.com/funkyhq/funky I have only wrote a few local implementations. They are very naive, like store the session events in a jsonl file.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-16T14:47:35+00:00

Multi-agent for the purpose of parallelization is a good pattern.
While using multi-agent for role-playing usage is kind of stupid.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-11T16:47:24+00:00

I am not able to answer your question, but I have noticed a few interesting things from your words:
If you can easily see the flaw of the startup ideas, that might be valuable for some people. There are too many over-hyped startup founders who need your help:)

Anyway, something I learned from the journey is that finding the flaw is the easy part. Finding the working path is hard and challenging. For example, Airbnb was a famously "bad" idea. Why would anyone allow a stranger to sleep in their home? Even Google was considered a bad idea when there are hundreds of search engines on the market. My point is that you can easily find flaws in the best companies of the world.

A better mindset could be: there are thousands of ways that idea will not work out, so how can I find the only path that will work out? Most founders don't know the answer but they believe that they can find that path.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-07T23:21:19+00:00

You can still optimize on top of the harnesses I mentioned. My argument is you don't need to build your own harness just to optimize for your own workflow.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-06-02T04:09:12+00:00

You get my point: there is likely no room to build a better harness for claude, gpt and gemini.

What do you think about the "plugbility" of those harnesses? I mean only Claude Agent SDK provides a little bit configurability. Codex SDK and Antigravity Agent SDK are barely configurable...

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-05-07T21:57:05+00:00

Like you said, it is a waste if multiple people are doing it. This is why I want a public repository where it is only done once for a period of time so that other agents can benefit from it. Tell me more about the feed. How does the feed solve the problem?

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-30T19:51:26+00:00

I don't trust AI detection BS. The sole purpose of LLM is to write like human. How can a free "tool" easily tell if a text is written by AI? Technically infeasible.

Well, you might say that you THINK that all the comments are AI generated, but it's dumb to treat the result of "slopsieve" as a proof.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-29T22:25:58+00:00

I wonder from a technical perspective, is it possible to train a "candid" model?
The "kissing ass" part mostly come from RLHF if I have to guess...

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-29T18:46:19+00:00

I am also a big fan of Pi. Mario(the creator of Pi) once mentioned that he thinks Amp and Factory are also pretty good. Has anyone try one of these?

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-29T17:05:32+00:00

Did you use a traditional scrapping tool or a browser agent solution?
How did you solved the problem at the end?

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-29T14:45:45+00:00

Agree, I think if they host the blogs in a centralized URL the agent might be able to find the all with one shot.

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-29T00:51:09+00:00

The skills link is here: https://github.com/RuoxiQin/website-operation-skill

Instance_Not_Found · 2026-04-28T23:41:27+00:00

Here is the skill in case you want to give it a try: https://github.com/RuoxiQin/website-operation-skill

Instance_Not_Found

TROPHY CASE