Building autonomous AI agents. Notes from the team building Gravity. AI workflows, the future of recurring work, and what we learn along the way.
An AI agent demo looks easy. You wire a model to a couple of tools, give it a prompt, and watch it do something impressive on the first try. The hard part is everything after the demo: the edge cases, the model that…
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You have a stack of work and three ways to clear it: hire an outsourcing firm, point an AI agent at it, or do it yourself. Each buys you something different. Outsourcing buys human capacity and someone who owns the…
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You have a pile of recurring work and two ways to clear it: hire a virtual assistant or hand it to an AI agent. The honest answer is that this is not a contest with one winner. A VA and an agent are good at genuinely…
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An SLA, a service level agreement, is a vendor's written promise about reliability. The headline number on the page is the part everyone reads. The part that actually decides what you are buying is the fine print:…
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Tax season is mostly a sorting problem. Receipts sit buried in your inbox, statements live in three different drives, and the form you need turns up the week after the deadline. The hard part is rarely the math; it…
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Summer internship season has one brutal feature: most of the cohort starts on the same Monday. Fifty welcome emails, fifty access requests, fifty doc packs sorted by team, and fifty calendars to fill, all due before…
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The week before a quarterly business review usually disappears into the same chore: hunting down numbers. You export revenue from billing, copy pipeline out of the CRM, pull product usage from analytics, chase…
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Mid-year review season arrives and the calendar fills with the same quiet dread. For every report, a manager has to find the goals set in January, remember what got shipped since, collect feedback from a handful of…
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It is mid-June, and the budget you approved in December no longer matches reality. One line is running hot, another came in soft, and a new hire was not in the plan. The reforecast that fixes all this is mostly…
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Back to school is not one task. It is a supply list per kid, a different schedule per kid, a stack of forms with deadlines, a budget you would rather not blow, and a dozen browser tabs comparing prices on the same…
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Zapier is genuinely good at one thing: when this happens, do that. A new row, a new email, a new form entry, and a fixed action fires. For simple, deterministic plumbing that almost never needs to think, it is hard…
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Ask "how many types of AI agents are there" and you will get a tidy answer: five. The standard taxonomy, set out in Russell and Norvig's textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, sorts agents into simple…
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Ask "is ChatGPT an AI agent?" and you get a different answer depending on which version of ChatGPT you mean and which day you ask. The plain chat box you type into is a chatbot. The newer agent and browsing modes can…
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If you have searched for AI agents lately, you have probably hit the phrase "the Big 4". It comes up constantly, and almost nobody defines it before using it. Here is the plain answer: the Big 4 AI agents are the…
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Search "best AI agents" and you get dozens of listicles that rank tools one to ten by an invented score, as if a writing assistant and a workflow automator competed in the same race. They do not. The honest answer is…
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A free tier looks like a gift until you read the fine print. Most AI agent free plans are not really about giving you free work; they are a shaped sample, generous enough to hook you, capped tightly enough that real…
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On 2026-06-12 we ran the counting scripts against this blog: 355 live posts, 704,255 words, 39 days since the first post went up on 2026-05-05. That is 9.1 posts per day at an average of 1,984 words each, written,…
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Will AI agents replace SaaS tools? Partly, and not the part most people expect. Agents are already absorbing the thin glue layer of software, the point tools, single-purpose automations, and light CRUD apps that…
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That matches how the people building these systems describe them. Anthropic defines agentic systems as ones where the model dynamically directs its own processes and tool usage (Building Effective Agents, 2024). This…
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Google I/O 2026, held May 19 to 20, was the clearest sign yet that the large platforms have stopped treating AI agents as a side feature and started treating them as the product. Sundar Pichai opened the keynote by…
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The most adopted, highest-ROI AI agent use cases in the first half of 2026 are customer support, software engineering, and sales and marketing operations, in that order, followed by knowledge search, inbox and…
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A multimodal AI agent is an agent that perceives and acts in more than text. It can look at a screenshot or a PDF (vision), hold a spoken conversation in real time (voice), and operate software by clicking, typing,…
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If you want the short version: there is no single best AI agent platform in mid-2026, and anyone who hands you one ranked list of ten tools is selling something. The honest answer is that the category leader changes…
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Here is the difference in one line: an AI agent is the thing that decides what to do, and an MCP server is one of the things it uses to do it. The agent is the worker with a goal. The MCP server is a standardized…
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The defining AI agent security story of 2026 is not a single named company breach. It is the maturing of a handful of attack classes that researchers and standards bodies documented through 2024 and 2025, now showing…
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In 2026, AI agents can finally talk to tools and to each other through open standards rather than bespoke glue code. Two protocols dominate the conversation: MCP (Model Context Protocol) for connecting an agent to…
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AI agents fail in production in a small number of predictable ways, and the failure is almost never that the underlying model was too weak. It is that nobody built a guardrail, a test, a budget cap, or a human…
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Vendor management is the work that scales badly. Ten vendors are manageable with a spreadsheet and a good memory. Fifty vendors, each with their own contract, renewal date, spend pattern, and compliance status,…
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Every recruiter has a graveyard of good candidates. The strong applicant who was a near-miss for a role last year. The silver-medal finalist who took another offer. The promising person who was not quite ready to…
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Social media scheduling is the kind of work that expands to fill whatever time you give it. You write a good post, then spend twenty minutes reformatting it for three platforms, guessing at the right posting time,…
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