About this episode

Nan Yu and Jacob Shumway discuss the essential rules for building effective AI agents in production.

📌 Copy the AI system I use to run a one-person $1M+ business: https://www.behindthecraft.com 🤝 Subscribe to my practical AI newsletter read by 150K+ professionals: https://creatoreconomy.so Nan and Jacob built Linear Agent, which has transformed how the $1.25B company gets work done. In this episode, they took me from the initial memo to launch, showing how to give an agent tools to find the context it needs, use evals to improve reliability, and more. This episode is a must-watch if you want a concrete, behind-the-scenes example of how to build a production agent end to end. We talked about: (00:00) What’s holding AI agents back as models improve? (00:51) Three things every good agent needs (03:00) Demo: The internal memo that started Linear Agent (09:50) The biggest mistake to avoid when building agents (11:29) Demo: From Slack to code in 6 minutes with the agent (17:01) When prototyping, “use the biggest model until it works” (24:02) Give agents tools to find context, not more context (34:07) The first thing to do before building an agent Thanks to our sponsors: Oceans: Hire AI-native EAs http://oceanstalent.com/peter Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video…

People in this episode

Host: Peter Yang

Guests: Nan Yu, Jacob Shumway

Topics covered

• AI agents
• production
• business automation
• reliability
• contextual tools

Keywords

• AI agents
• production
• business
• automation
• reliability
• context

Sponsors

Oceans, Riverside, Linear

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Linear, Creator Economy

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