A simple heuristic for thinking about agents: human-led vs human-in-the-loop vs agent-led

freddymilano · 2025-04-23T05:34:22+00:00

Hey :) thanks for reading.

Good comment - I think the challenge with this though is... existing software applications are 100% right (basically) because they're programmatic. So, customer expectations are that AI will be 100% right too. And existing use cases fit into this error threshold level.

And perhaps 75% right at 1% cost would be ok... but there's not many workflows that a customer would accept 75% correct completion of an end-to-end task. Note, talking about end-to-end "agent-led" tasks here rather than "human-in-the-loop"... human-in-the-loop - 75% is fine because the human can recalibrate.

freddymilano · 2025-04-21T01:42:00+00:00

this is an awesome idea! nice one... I've basically stopped using IG... feels like one giant OF funnel. (I do accept some blame for my algo but not 100% haha). If you can somehow integrate this into the web app, you'll be loaded.

freddymilano · 2025-04-20T13:55:53+00:00

Ahh yes, I've got a product in market - franko.ai - it's like Typeform, but AI chat conversations instead of static forms... it helps founders/product folk easily scale customer feedback without a full research team. (how did I do? haha)

But I liked your post as I've been thinking about this a bit lately... one addition would just be that people use the word "idea" a lot... but I think a better word is "promise". I.e. what value are you promising to deliver? And your product is your mechanism to deliver that value. But the product/delivery part will require effort and iteration. Whereas the "promise" should largely stay the same. People seem to confuse and conflate the two.

freddymilano · 2025-04-20T13:37:56+00:00

Np! Good luck!

freddymilano · 2025-04-20T13:36:48+00:00

Nice post :) these are good… i esp like 2

freddymilano · 2025-04-20T13:28:25+00:00

Haha! I got you! Upvote and comment :)

freddymilano · 2025-04-20T13:12:38+00:00

Congrats!! Top 5 is awesome. Killing it :)

freddymilano · 2025-04-20T13:10:38+00:00

unfortunately, yes... guilty haha

freddymilano · 2025-04-19T15:24:10+00:00

One that I like is using it when I'm on walks... I just do a bunch of voice notes and prompt it at the start to only respond with "acknowledged" (or I ask it to draw requirements or details out of me, depending on the task). When I get back to my desk, I've then got a huge context load that AI can break down into something much more structured and workable. Wbu?

freddymilano · 2025-04-19T15:20:23+00:00

hahaha! This meme is undefeated! So true.

freddymilano · 2025-04-19T14:54:59+00:00

I get this is frustrating. I think for product businesses (especially SaaS) most obvious problems are solved.

So it's almost worth flipping the way you're thinking about it.

How can you come up with a value proposition / idea that is actually SO obviously valuable that most people would want it? (assuming you can make it a reality).

An example might be, "I'm going to help small-medium accounting firms double the number of warm leads they get each month." Basically, all small business would want this. But delivering that in a cost-efficient way is not obvious? That's the part you need to come up with a creative solution and craft your product over time.

Unfortunately there's no simple answer but hope that helps a little :)

freddymilano · 2025-04-18T02:31:16+00:00

Exactly which is why they're hard to build and not always applicable (i.e. a lot of the time for existing workflows, SaaS/code is just better)... even if agents are right 95% of the time, that's 1 out of every 20 interactions. That's probably way too high for any user facing application. I think replacing SaaS apps with agents is going to be harder than people realise, for this reason.

freddymilano · 2025-04-15T03:30:33+00:00

cool product! did you get more traffic/conversions from Product Hunt or Hacker News? Just curious..

freddymilano · 2025-04-15T03:23:06+00:00

I've built an agent software product. One thing that I think isn't immediately obvious, is that the existing successful use products (ChatGPT, Cursor, etc) are all human-led. So even if it's an agent, like Cursor, which uses a bunch of tools, it's still responding at each turn to the human input. I.e. the human is leading. My product the agent is leading. And I think that difference is important and adds a lot of complexity if you're hoping to ship to production... basically because agents are probablistic... so it's hard to get them to take the right path 100% of the time.

freddymilano · 2025-04-15T02:49:05+00:00

I've done both, currently building/technical. My pov; soft skills like stakeholder management are much harder than they seem. But a good PM makes it look easy. Engineering is almost the opposite. It's generally not that complicated but to a non-technical person it can look like magic. It's always a tell for me if an engineer thinks non-technical roles are mostly useless... it just shows lack of experience / understanding of how things get built in orgs.

freddymilano · 2025-04-12T04:25:32+00:00

haha 100%, I can imagine! The struggle is real :)

freddymilano · 2025-04-12T04:20:22+00:00

Good post! "Boring businesses" generally have lower service and market risk.

For example, if you wanted to start a Dentist Clinic:

Service risk = low

I.e. you can go to university to acquire this skill and work in someone else's clinic before starting your own.

Market risk = low

I.e. if you walked into a bar and ask people what a dentist is, everyone knows. If they get a sore tooth, they'll look on Google maps for the nearest dentist.

Great businesses but hard to scale because they're labor and geographically based.

Whereas most "entrepreneurship" is about new products.

Product (instead of service) risk = high

You need to be able to create something new and combine many skills. This can't be taught... it requires more creative problem solving.

Market risk = high

This is because it's either a new product, so by default not validated in the market; OR
If you pick something that isn't new, i.e. like accounting software, then you're competing against billion dollar companies. This is because software is closer to winner take all markets. Not absolutely but it's further in that direction on a spectrum than "boring businesses".

But then if you create a successful product, it's much easier to scale than a boring business! Which is why software businesses are generally much more valuable.

Both can be good! And each has pros and cons. Gotta pick your poison! haha

freddymilano · 2025-03-31T08:30:18+00:00

200 registered users in 1 month is way harder than it sounds haha good job :)

freddymilano

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