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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

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Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#221

Post by idopmstuff »

trencedamp wrote: post #194
idopmstuff wrote: post #155

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. The experience of getting it there makes me pretty s…

> I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines. > A common set is having Claude take some product photos and turn them into lifestyle ones using ChatGPT via Claude in Chrome. It's a pretty well-honed workflow at this point, but it'll still return images where the product is obviously not co…

> They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines.

Silly and pointless criticism. Why do the semantics of the word intelligence matter?

Also, you need to understand that language evolves over time, and people often use a word to describe a thing that is newly discovered or invented that's similar to the word being used, because it's a helpful way of describing it that the listener will understand better than a longwinded technical description. The purpose of language is to communicate thoughts, not engage in pedantry.

> But things like this slip by a frontier model in the same way AI from a few years ago would generate an image with seven fingers.

Yes, you make an excellent point here that over time, the capabilities of these models to recognize certain categories of problems have increased dramatically. I expect this will continue!

> it's foolish to give them "a company" to run, because they cannot understand when they've made a mistake the way even the least competent human can.

The words of someone who has not spent time with the least competent human, or anything close to it.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#222

Post by lnenad »

ianberdin wrote: post #206
mchusma wrote: post #192

There was surprisingly little information on how they actually do this, but we run our business with a large number of, what we call "AI employees" in addition to regular employees, and they act in interesting ways. We've been building out orchestration tools to handle this, and we'll probably do a write-up or blog post on it soon. May even open source some of it. The preview is that the problem with most agents (and…

What worries me most are questions like this: these autonomous AI employees or automations - it doesn't change the essence - consume a lot of LLM tokens. Please tell me, how do you pay for this? Do you use, for example, the Anthropic or OpenAI API directly, or do you connect, for example, a Codex subscription?

If you use a bajillion tokens your economical approach is to self host.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#223

Post by owebmaster »

tantalor wrote: post #214
Nevin1901 wrote: post #132

Correct me if I'm wrong but a human will be able to cut through the noise with quirky advertising, new/novel distribution methods, etc. Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales. These specifically require doing something unique or interesting. Sure, maybe LLMs can help with fulfillment or operations, but distribution still remains the hard part.

skills/advertising_and_sales.md skills/novel_distribution.md skills/unique_and_interesting.md Naive to think you can't reduce these to instructions.

Do you really think AI can automate distribution, marketing, sales? That's just spam.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#224

Post by mchusma »

jgilias wrote: post #217
mchusma wrote: post #192

There was surprisingly little information on how they actually do this, but we run our business with a large number of, what we call "AI employees" in addition to regular employees, and they act in interesting ways. We've been building out orchestration tools to handle this, and we'll probably do a write-up or blog post on it soon. May even open source some of it. The preview is that the problem with most agents (and…

At $DAYJOB we do something very similar shape-wise. I wonder - it sounds like you have a dedicated agent comms plane? In our case we found that the easiest and most straightforward was to just use our default company chat app directly for this. Because most of the context that the agent workers need to do work is there, but also, it’s just much easier for teams to conceptualise an agent colleague if it just hangs out…

We do have a control panel, but it’s in effect a server that has things in a database. All chats, tasks, assignments are all there. This felt easier to debug and manage versus putting it all in slack, although we considered it. I don’t think anything we are doing is particularly “fancy”, but basically one agent sends a message to another one. It saves the message in the db, then adds the message to that other bot same as any other user chat. We have an internal website where anyone in the company can see the bits they are authorized to see and can see all chats. These AI workers are single threaded, but we see that as more of a feature than a bug (minimize complexity). They all work their way through a shared task list, which is just another table in our remote server sqllite.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#225

Post by idopmstuff »

Denzel wrote: post #215
josh_p wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He writes about it on his substack. https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/

Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.

That's a fair criticism for some of it, but in a lot of cases I try to automate things that don't have alternatives because they're unique to me (e.g. all the brands I own in my fund have one bank account but need to be tracked separately for investor payback purposes, so I have a Claude skill that takes all of my transactions and assigns them to the various Google Sheets ledgers I have).

In other cases I'm doing stuff that's complex enough that there's no real "alternative" at this point that doesn't involve hiring one or more people and working with them for an extended period. My next set of posts is going to be about my latest acquisition and how AI redesigned a Shopify store then designed and launched Meta ads, all of which only took a couple of days but is going to easily push revenue up by something like 40% this year. The money made is great, as is the money saved on people I would've hired to do this sort of thing, but the real cherry on top is that even hiring someone would've required me to spend waaaaay more time than I did here. So big ROI on the money but also the time, which is arguably more important, since time savings permit me to acquire more brands.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#226

Post by idopmstuff »

joshgachnang wrote: post #183
idopmstuff wrote: post #155

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. The experience of getting it there makes me pretty s…

How are you automating all the parts? OpenClaw/Hermes?

Mostly Claude Code and a lot of internal tools that it's built. I've honestly still not had a chance to play with those kinds of harnesses yet, but my impression is they're just a better way for you to instruct an assistant to take care of things in order to get them done. My goal isn't to be managing an assistant, it's to get things automated without my input (and where my input is needed, have the assistant escalate to me).

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#227

Post by idopmstuff »

j2kun wrote: post #195
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your target audience and what do you sell them?

From their blog [1] "I acquire e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon" Honestly it sounds like the OP is part of the machine that makes Amazon such a trashy marketplace these days. [1]: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...

Well that's not very nice!

And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#228

Post by idopmstuff »

jamilton wrote: post #186
idopmstuff wrote: post #155

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. The experience of getting it there makes me pretty s…

For anything visual, they are still effectively blind, right? Still just working off the image embedding, sometimes using scripts to actually inspect individual pixels.

Blind seems too far here - Claude's increasingly able to diagnose visual issues on its own. I used to have to check every single image it generated, but now it's at the point where it'll catch most bad ones and regenerate them before it gets to the review step. Still misses some, though.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#229

Post by mchusma »

orourke wrote: post #205
mchusma wrote: post #192

There was surprisingly little information on how they actually do this, but we run our business with a large number of, what we call "AI employees" in addition to regular employees, and they act in interesting ways. We've been building out orchestration tools to handle this, and we'll probably do a write-up or blog post on it soon. May even open source some of it. The preview is that the problem with most agents (and…

This is fascinating. What is the split between human and AI labor? What kinds of tasks are the bots doing? How much autonomy do they have to make decisions (i.e. spending money, issuing refunds, touch cloud infra, etc)? I'd love to learn more about how you do this.

I hope to post something within a few weeks. But our philosophy is generally if it can be done deterministically with software (eg run payroll on autopilot via an api to gusto) then do that. If it can be done by an ai agent, do it with that but add as much software as possible to make it reliable at that thing. And the ai agents are all tuned to escalate to humans as needed. Then there is also just things that are completely human.

A typical example of something that is AI vs human is the AI most commonly operates like “managers”. For example, reviewing transcripts of every demo call, compiling results, figuring out insights, learnings that need to update our company docs, feedback to humans (who run the demos).

We are big fans of having AI agents “own” koi’s because now anytime we say “we really should be doing this” we try to set it up on the spot.

The “downside” here is that I do occasionally get busy, and if I’m the only one who can approve or unstick one of these bots, it just keeps harassing me until it gets done. This is a sign generally that I need to hire someone to own a set of bots.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#230

Post by noncoml »

ipsod wrote: post #152
noncoml wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m genuinely not sure who is meant for Engineering. The one who would try it again or the one who wouldn’t

if curiosity > pain avoidance: engineer

I see. Sounds more like a scientist to me :)
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