Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things.
- Randy Pausch
In the early spring of 2025, my business partner Jess and I found ourselves deeply dug into solving other people’s problems - client problems - after having run into a brick wall trying to get AI agents to independently operate in a marketplace on our behalf.
To be sure, the technology wasn’t quite there….but a lot goes unsaid in such a statement. The devil is in the details. Why? Why, when we integrated agents into our workflow and attempted to give them a guided but independent role were things going so horribly wrong?
We’d bitched about it together. We’d sketched around a little. And then we’d put our heads back down to go solve other problems. This isn’t atypical of how we’ve worked together over the years; it usually comes in fits and starts.
Jess isn’t just a guy that I invent with - he’s one of my dearest friends. We’ve known each other for a long time - long enough to have had a few quarrels, fundamental disagreements, and frustrations with one another. This has helped shape our most excellent agreement for working together, and it’s understood that we may go 6 months without needing to reference it because we’re, for the most part, working on different things.
It is with this backdrop that, separated by workflows and geographies, I received an intellectual and emotional cherry bomb conveniently disguised as a lab note - Jess’ technical whitepaper outline positing the causes and effects of modern LLM’s architecture problem.
Reading it, I felt a surprising emotion: jealousy. This little scribble felt like a window into the near future. It was a technological roadmap that could unlock some of the greatest sociotechnological barriers to human+computer collaboration. It took our learnings, went backwards, wiped the slate clean, and began a new, extremely hopeful chapter.
That was my reading experience. I wouldn’t expect it to be yours. As Jess often says, our lab notes can read like the scribbles of madmen. But to me, this felt like truth. I called him up and told him exactly what was in my heart, “Dude, I’m jealous of you!” And then I felt better. Giddy really. Because Jess had shown me a bright light on a future that I felt desperate to build, right behind the brick wall with an imprint of my forehead on it. This notebook is the story of what happens next.