Blurbs

Design is crucial. Period. Just enough design. Just in time.

What is just enough or just in time?

What problem are you solving? How irreversible are decisions you make? What's the impact of getting it wrong? Who's impacted? When do they need it?

Only you know how to find the answer to questions like these unique to your situation. And, don’t hate me for pointing out that how you get answers to questions like these is a process.

Just enough process.

If your new business idea is to take an existing product and do it the 'new way' while incumbents are still doing it the 'old way' you're cooked.

Its only a matter of time till they do it the 'new way' too and your growth potential vanishes.

Consider solving new problems that didn't exist or weren't as painful until the 'new way' arrived instead. Maybe build something around that.

(This is a note to myself as much as anyone else)

It's really important to give your agents solid success criteria and clear stop conditions.

Today I got a local file search engine tooled for my agents. It could work as part of RAG, or in my case just as a place for a research assistant to pull from and cite my ebooks and transcripts.

But, sometimes without clear instructions for when to stop, agents love to keep crafting 100 variations of search queries trying to find an answer not knowing that “no result” is valid result.

I'm reminded that teams are like this too. If you don't set clear success criteria they'll spin their wheels or keep making up work if you're not careful. It's not their fault they can't read minds. It's a failure of direction.

Are you an Ernie or a Bert? What kind of imagination are you developing?

In the popular television show Sesame Street, there was a skit where Ernie wakes Bert to tell him he can't sleep. He's scared of shadows, spooky things, and monsters.

Bert reminds Ernie that they are both friends with other furry puppet monsters like Grover, Herry, and Cookie Monster. He goes on to say, "you're imagining all those scary things, but you can imagine nice and good things too."

Bert then asks Ernie to name things he likes. Ernie responds with "Big balloons." "What else?" "Little balloons." "There must be something else." "Sure, medium-sized balloons."

Do you have an overdeveloped imagination of scary things? Are you limiting your imagination of good things?

The one thing that would prevent the "Cambrian Explosion" of agents and workflows I predicted is cost.

For that explosion to really take off, access to knowledge and tools has to be in more people's hands.

A back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests the current (March 2026) upper limit of people who could use harnesses to make LLMs and tools do interesting things is tens of millions globally. This estimate is based on paid subscriptions to ChatGPT or Anthropic, or access to Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen, et al.

But if you want to do truly interesting things (the kind that require wild YOLO agent runs), the daily included tokens on entry-level accounts run out quickly. Then your choices are to upgrade to $200-plus-per-month accounts or use pay-per-token APIs, which can easily run into the tens of dollars for single jobs.

The other option is beefy on-prem hardware to run open models, but that comes with hardware, skill, and maintenance costs.

This exposes a different compounding effect, the power law, where the most interesting autonomous agent evolution concentrates and compounds faster among those who have ideas, knowledge, and money. "

What if the strongest signal of the agentic era isn't buzz about Openclaw, but a pricing page rewrite in an unrelated product? Remotion's move hints at exactly that.

Remotion is a tool that turns code into videos using React.

Early this month (February 2026), they reworded their per render pricing from "Video Renders" to "Remotion for Automators".

This is the first time I've seen a pricing model specifically for agentic workflows. An agent running in a harness calling Remotion is an example "prompt-to-video app" their licensing page explicitly mentions as the target of their per-render pricing.

Remotion also released the Skill to help build high volume video production into your app in minutes.

Don't worry though, individuals and small teams can render as many videos as they'd like for free.