I. The Unique Nature of Agent Development
Nonlinear Construction
The past two years of building agent infrastructure have been fraught with ups and downs, with an internal conflict between thinking "This will never work" and "We can definitely solve this." Although the current reasoning systems are far from perfect, they are stable enough for integration into tools and daily life. Today's agent development process is more nonlinear than ever, requiring imagination on how semantics can be transformed from incomprehensible online data corpora to black-box large language models, as well as how to manipulate characters in prompts to obtain reasonable answers, while also conducting data checks and evaluations.
Building Relationships with Work
As new manifestations of intelligence emerge, they bring new types of relationships. When building agents, engineers must deal with their relationship with their work, such as the agent's memory and understanding. It is necessary to consider what it means for the work to understand the user and to understand the engineer themselves, and what it means to build on a system that understands itself.
II. The Help of the Creative Process
Dealing with Uncertainty
The nonlinear process of agent development and the relationship with work are in the realm of artists, while engineers are accustomed to control. Now, they must delve into uncertainty, accepting the possibility of failure and embarrassment.
Inspiring Innovation
The creative process can support artists, and for engineers, it is a right, a discipline of investing time, and an acceptance of only being able to control the process and not the outcome. Agent development brings engineers closer to the mindset of artists, and if engineers embrace and protect their creative process, it will unlock the next level of innovation in society.