"We're using old software development techniques to build these features and we're not actually taking full advantage of what AI can do. I think the promise of AI for many of us is that it allows us to..."

"Welcome to another episode of The Breakdown. Today we're lucky to have Pete Kumman, our partner here at YC. Pete was the founder of Optimizely which built software to help companies AB test. Pete, wel..."

"like cursor and wind surf to build software with AI, it feels like the most powerful tool I've ever used, right? It's this feeling of being able to create anything I want. Anything I can picture in my..."

"phenomenal, right? Gemini is amazing. The model itself is absolutely incredible. We've been using it a lot at YC to automate our own work. I'm so impressed with what they built. Um, but a lot of that ..."

"over by like or he's been fished and I need to report fishing like something's going horribly wrong. accounts been hacked, right? There's two big problems with this. The first problem is, like you're ..."

"models are now capable of doing things like that where it's actually anticipating all of the things that will need to happen as a result of my daughter waking up with the flu and helping me do those t..."

"me. Why is that? Well, what's actually happening under the hood when I ask this Gmail agent for a draft is that this Gmail agent, this little UI, combines my prompt, which is the one we we just talked..."

"actually built a little demo so that you can see the impact of a system prompt on the email draft, right? And so we combine our sort of supposed Gmail system prompt with my user prompt here asking for..."

"to say anything that's going to embarrass Google. I I remember it was either Google or Facebook released like a scientific model like pretty early on and then very very quickly pulled it back because ..."

"like this in a way that looks a lot like software that we've been building for decades, right? And so just to illustrate what's possible, let's imagine that Gmail allowed me to not only see but edit t..."

"did the Gmail team hide decide to hide this system prompt away? My contention is that a lot of AI app developers including the Gmail team in this case are treating the system prompt the same way they'..."

"that developers today are using AI in the previous generation of software development that they've been used to? Yes. Um, and so you use this phrase, the AI horseless carriage. Maybe tell us what you ..."

"the the deepest problem here is that when the when the Gmail team set out to build this, they kind of asked, "How can we slot AI into the Gmail application? How do we replace the horse and put an engi..."

"example. So this is an example of an email inbox. It's got a bunch of messages on the right hand side and there's an agent operating in this inbox and it's an instead of an email writing agent, it's a..."

"thing I find interesting about this is this is really the code. This is the programming you are doing for this agent. But if you read it, it's pretty accessible, right? It says if it's a techreated em..."

"intuitive. And so, for example, here here's what happens when I apply this little agent to each one of the emails in this inbox. Amazing. I love this. Um, this is a this is an essay. Uh, but it's not ..."

"Yes. And to me uh like we will have caught up when everybody uh has the same experience that we have when we're using these coding agents in their particular domain. Right? So when accountants can bui..."

"accounting agents. I think there's two reasons. Um, the first is that these AI models are incredibly good at processing text, right? So, if I can write a good description of a thing I want, they can p..."

"by definition allow you to to get to the bare metal, right? to get under the hood of what whatever it is you're working with. And so the teams that built these these tools allowed me full access to ha..."

"I hope we're able to move beyond u this this moment in time where there's so much assumed liability on the part of the application developers for what these models do. Well, I think the interesting po..."

"Yeah. It's it's a shift in mentality. Uh giving giving AI to the user as a tool and they can use it for whatever their purposes are versus feeling like you as a developer have to be responsible for ev..."

"remarkable or interesting for somebody to use to be able to use a computer right? And so what happened is we all just sort of figured out how to use these things and the interfaces got better, right? ..."

"able to do this. I'm not sure everyone will want to or to have the initiative or agent like we're three founders sitting here. We love to tinker with this stuff. Like you're telling me about your mom ..."

"check the drafts anymore. Send it." And then if you spot something that's not quite right, you say, "Oh, no, no, no. I would have phrased that this way or this other way." and the human would take tha..."

"autoupdate. Absolutely. Right. And and these are great examples of um UI conventions that we just haven't figured out yet, right? And and you can see people are experimenting with different models her..."

"possible. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Some of the work that we've done at YC, building agents to automate some of the repetitive work that we and our teammates do on a regular basi..."

"the prompting, right? And and Tom is kind of saying like there's a going to be a bunch of innovation on how we write system prompts or how we edit them or or iterate on them. In the essay, you also ta..."

"we built a we built an early version of this inside of YC and we're already seeing employees of YC automate parts of their job that are easy to automate. And and the difference that these tools provid..."