phoebe
@phoebe
culture eats strategy for breakfast
phoebe
true masters feel the answer before they can explain the answer in words.
If you want to untangle something, like string or a cord, focus on adding as much “looseness” as you can rather than trying to untangle it.
-Kevin Kelly
Idle agents will turn us into even more of productivity monsters
Every industrial leap promised more leisure. Instead, it raised the baseline.
Factories did not shorten ambition. And as agents run 24/7, time becomes even more yield-bearing.
So AI may mean we’ll have more time for “less mundane things”, but markets will likely turn that into higher
Idle agents are idle leverage
It feels like a wasted opportunity every moment your agents are not running.
If intelligence can operate asynchronously, then inactivity is lost upside.
What valuable work could be happening right now, even while I sleep?
How big is your team of agents? How many projects are they working on? Are you making the most of
Delegated decision-making makes context exponentially more valuable
As agents take on more decisions, the cost of being wrong goes up. So does the value of context.
Let’s take a look at a travel site like Expedia. Even today, with years of transaction history, it struggles to recommend well from 2,000 options. Now imagine delegating that decision
People don’t know how to ask good questions, so prompt containers beat blank canvases
Most people don’t know how to ask good questions. They want to be fed good questions to click on.
Every chat-first product assumes the user will remember it exists, translate a vague need into language, and trust the system enough to try. That’s the real cold start.
You do not get to “perfectly simple” by starting simple. You get there by exhausting the subject.
This is the operating loop:
- Make the maximal version.
- Rewrite it so someone else can follow.
- Cut until the meaning would break if you cut more.
- Compress to one sentence you can carry.
As agent interfaces like ChatGPT or Claude become prompt-driven distribution surfaces, we’re going to see a new crop of apps come to life.
You don’t win by being downloaded. You win by being invoked.
In this world, apps are discovered by capability. Ranking is based on whether the tool works, how fast it is, how reliably it succeeds, and whether it
Ads are the lazy conclusion.
We’re used to money coming from two places: users, or people paying to influence users.
We assume ads are the inevitable shape of that second bucket because that’s the last 20 years.
But ads are the most misaligned version: they monetize interruption at the exact layer that’s getting most intimate.
The better endpoint is