Building autonomous AI agents. Notes from the team building Gravity. AI workflows, the future of recurring work, and what we learn along the way.
This is the post I avoided writing for a year. The financial postmortem at the honest cost of three shutdowns was uncomfortable. This one is harder. Three startup shutdowns over four years did real damage to my…
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Workflow automation and AI agents look like the same product category from a distance. They run things on your behalf, integrate with your tools, and remove drudgery. Up close, they are different abstractions, with…
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Sales conversations in 2025 and 2026 routinely include the phrase "AI agents are basically RPA 2.0". The phrase is a category error. Agents and RPA solve overlapping problems but at different abstraction layers, with…
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"Copilot" and "agent" are now used interchangeably in marketing copy, which makes the buyer's job harder. The two categories are different. A copilot helps a person do their work; an agent does the work and reports…
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The terms "AI agent", "chatbot", and "assistant" are used interchangeably by vendors and inconsistently by buyers. The result is that procurement decisions get made on the basis of marketing copy rather than on the…
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The most common question I have been asked since Gravity went public is some version of: why are you not raising? After three shutdowns and a clean fourth bet, the assumption is that VC capital is the next move. The…
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Vibe AI was an AI friend product. From mid-2025 to early 2026, real users showed up, used it daily, and told me, in their own words, that they liked it. It also lost money on every active user every month. The full…
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The hardest shutdown across all three startups was the one with revenue attached. Specifically, the $100K-annual-run-rate slice of Super AI that was working in 2025 even as the surrounding product was structurally…
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Week 1 of Gravity is in the books. This is the tactical retrospective, written in the format I plan to use weekly: what shipped, what tools settled in, what decisions got made, what problems hit, week-1 metrics, and…
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The 10x rule from Zero to One applies at the product level: the whole product needs to be 10x better than the closest alternative for users to switch (Volt Equity, Thiel 10x rule). It is well-known and widely cited.…
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The public version of the Super AI postmortem is on this site already (read it here). It explains the structural failure: an all-in-one AI router built in 2024, killed in March 2025, in a category that was getting…
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From October 2022 to October 2023, I built MindWave out of Pune. Mental health, private sharing, support, journaling, group therapy on the roadmap, free professional community next to it. The product worked in the…
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People ask what the day looks like, the day a founder decides to shut down. The truthful answer is: it does not look like a day. It looks like weeks of rationalisation followed by a small moment that finally tips the…
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After three shutdowns, idea selection is no longer a creative act. It is a structured one. The cost of starting the wrong thing is now measured in years, not in weeks of energy. The rubric below is what I now run…
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Aryan Agarwal, building Gravity, from Bangalore. The default assumption when a 3x founder builds an AI agent platform is San Francisco. The default assumption is wrong for this company; it is also probably wrong for…
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This is a timing post, not a thesis post. The thesis lives in describe outcome, not workflow,workflow editors are the wrong abstraction once intelligence has moved into the system. This post is the narrower question:…
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Vibe AI was an AI friend. From March 2025 to February 2026, I built it, ran it, watched it work in week one, watched it stop working by week three, and then watched the unit economics confirm what week three had…
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Three startups, three shutdowns, three different missing checks. After the third one I realised the same framework would have killed every bad bet before it cost a year. This is the framework. None of the three…
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Super AI ran from March 2024 to March 2025. Twelve months. The pitch fit on a sticker: describe what you want, we'll pick the model. An all-in-one AI app that auto-routed each prompt to the best foundation model, GPT…
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This is month 1 of Gravity, in public. Public means: I write the retro before I have all the answers, name what shipped and what didn't, and let the kill thresholds I set at month start judge themselves. The point is…
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From October 2022 to October 2023 I ran a mental health startup out of Pune called MindWave. Thirteen months. The core product, private sharing, journaling, and venting, shipped. Real users came. Real users came…
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Every Gravity capability ships through 80+ tests across 8 failure categories before it goes near a real user. Not because we love testing, because AI agents are non-deterministic, and "it worked once" is not a…
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The economics of an AI agent company come down to one equation: per-active-agent revenue minus per-active-agent cost-of-inference. If the result is positive, the company can self-fund. If it's negative, no amount of…
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Zapier was the right abstraction for the 2010s. Trigger, step, action, condition, branch. A multi-billion-dollar business on the premise that the user could design the path. The premise is no longer right. The…
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Three shutdowns ago, I'd have raised a seed round to build Gravity. After three shutdowns, the framework I came back to is bootstrap. Not because raising is wrong, it's the right move for plenty of founders, but…
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In early 2026, 40% of AI startups launched in 2024 had already shut down (TechStartups, AI shutdowns roundup, December 2025). I'd already been in three of those statistics, just a year or two earlier than the cohort.…
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