013 AI For Operators

Sawyer shares agent design principles and demos a simple N8N Gmail-tagging agent with a twist that helps eliminate hallucinations.

• Advances in the last 6 months have brought reliability, better UI, and more capabilities; “level one” agents now useful.

• Deterministic vs agentic litmus test: fixed A→B→C workflows need rules; exploratory or variable tasks benefit from tool-using agents.

• Building agent-first tooling has its own challenges: operators must design tools for how models act, not humans.

• One-screen N8N flow: new Gmail email triggers filter, fetches existing labels, forces single-label choice, then applies it.

• Guardrails and alerts: high-priority emails trigger a Slack message; no auto-replies; allows him to stay out of his inbo

• Modular beats monsters: small, single-purpose flows are easier to maintain and debug than sprawling “10,000-node” YouTube showpieces.

Practical

• Scaling AI at Atlassian: Here’s how Atlassian built 3,000 agents to work alongside its 13,000 employees.

• Interface0: a tool that puts all models in one place, gives you cross-model memory, and much more - worth exploring!

• Are agentic browsers too risky to use? This article explores the threat that prompt injections present for the viability of agentic browsers like Perplexity’s Comet.

Perspectives

• We must build AI for people; not to be a person: a new essay from Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI

• How much energy does Google’s AI use? Spoiler alert: not much.

News

• The MIT report that rattled the market: It said that 95% of generative AI initiatives failed to show rapid revenue acceleration. Is that the right bar? What’s more interesting: poor integration and lack of adoption seem to be the main drivers of underperformance, not the technology itself.

• Are CEOs adopting AI? This article from the Times shows how some CEOs are embracing AI - and working to get their teams to adopt it, too.

• What’s going on with Amazon’s AI efforts? Well, they’re still chasing AGI, for one.

Thanks for reading,

Tom Guthrie

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