Behind the Craft · Sunday, August 9, 2026
Nan Yu reflects on the rapid evolution of AI agents, noting that their initial concept, developed in late 2025, was for a 'robotic program manager' to handle tedious tasks. This perspective has shifted dramatically in just one year, with AI agents now seen as capable of creative work and interactive problem-solving, transcending their initial role of simply automating 'boring stuff'.
“So, I'll show you right now. I was working with Jacob with the other day, and I'm like, I dug this up. This is a memo I wrote and like, if you look, it's like the second half of, uh, 2025. Right? So it's like not that long ago in human time, but like in AI time, it's it's, you know, ancient history.”
“Like that's like the central sort of central thesis of this thing and, uh, it's, you know, and we kind of structured this idea about, uh, you know, before we'd really have this technical idea in our head, we had this idea about like there's some kind of triggering event and then this context that happens and you have instruction and you kind of loop on on actions and and ends with some kind of result, right?”
“And and I think what what has changed, right, about how we think about it today, right, which, you know, we're in the second half of 2026, so it's literally just a year later, uh, is that we don't think of just giving it the boring stuff. I'm sure you're going to give it the boring stuff, but also there's a lot of like creative possibilities, right?”