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October 7, 2026 / Amit Prasad
Contrary to some of my prior writing, I’ve been having a grand ol’ time working with agents… mostly. Today’s world is the world in which my strangest ideas can be birthed, designed, prototyped, tested, and then thrown in the trash by the dozen, with little more than a spark of inspiration and a ramshackle prompt.
In the past I’d always struggle comitting to ideas. “Is it new?”, “Is it differentiated?”, or most frequently, “Is it even worth putting my time into?” Nowadays, the calculus has disappeared. No longer does even the weakest idea have to be killed without a fighting chance. In fact, doing such a thing almost seems like a terrible waste, given how casually I can tag @Claude (or @Devin, or what have you) to take over a nascent idea and nurture it.
A shower thought, which once may have come to naught, now becomes the seed behind an agent session whilst I wait for the elevator. As my train starts to roll towards Manhattan, I’ve already posted two further clarifications, and by the time I get to my corner spot in the office, I’ve got a graph, or table, or PR, clamoring for my attention.
Of course, it’s always a little grotesque: imperfect and idiosyncratic in ever more subtle ways. But more often than not it’s enough to conclusively determine that Thing A is worth working on, or Thing B is indeed a stupid idea.
…or was it actually conclusive? Is Thing A actually worth putting more time into, or does it just look like a good idea at surface level? What about the lingering hope I have about Thing B? What if the agent just fudged something?
Whilst the cost of trying is approaching zero, the cost of judging remains as high as ever. Our world is an attention economy, and “attention is all you need” continues to seem so incredibly prescient. With so much of my time shifting from ideation and implementation to judging and review, I can feel my enthusiasm for the ideation process draining away.
Perhaps I shouldn’t think of the troves of forgotten ideas as a graveyard, but rather as providing the fertilizer necessary to make the nurture the best ideas that much more. With untempered use of agents, all I have is a scrapyard of bits and bobs, rusting away as oddities that arguably should never have been.
Perhaps focus is just the art of forgetting.