Filed under: automation
8 storiesThe archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.
Anthropic's junior technical hiring falls from 27% to 9%
The company's own report says agents now log six times the hours its people do, and sit idle 80% of the time waiting for a human to reply. The bottleneck has moved, and it is you.
Vercel's inbound agent now runs on 14 rules, not 1,000 lines
Vercel's COO has described how one engineer at 20% time, a prompt written by the best SDR and six weeks of human checking produced an agent that handles the top of the funnel. The lesson is what came after: most of the prompt turned out to be code.
Vercel cut its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25
The company's COO says home-built agents now handle 90% of inbound sales development and 93% of support cases, on an infrastructure bill in the single-digit thousands a year.
Sort the job into four buckets before you approve the hire
Write down the ten things the new person would actually do, then split them into judgment, relationship, repetition and coordination. Three of those buckets are not a hiring problem.
SaaStr runs on three people and 20 agents. Here is where they broke
Jason Lemkin has published an account of every AI agent SaaStr runs, including the one that emailed 1,000 founders from a banned address. The useful part is the failures.
Zapier's CEO says AI agents save him two hours a day
Wade Foster has handed his briefings, his email drafts and part of his hiring process to software. The claimed return is two hours daily, on his own account.
Picnic's collapse leaves Moto Pizza with two idle $160,000 robots
A supplier shutting down in May turned a Seattle restaurant's pizza machines into cabinets. It is the latest in a run of robotic-pizza failures that includes Zume, Pazzi and Basil Street.
How one consultant cut 20 hours of weekly admin with Claude
Grace Clarke says she now runs her service business on tools she built herself: an hourly pipeline, a proposal maker and a replacement inbox. The method is copyable; the price tag is not stated.