Productivity

The Third Agentic AI Gap When I first started building my mental model for agentic AI, I identified two types of gaps that you need to fix when working with agents: Knowledge gaps : agent doesn’t know something you want it to know, like your name or what type of equipment you have in your home gym. Behavioral gaps : agent doesn’t behave the way you’d like or expect. For example, it guesstimates character counts instead of counting characters. I’ve since realized there’s a third type: capability gaps. ...

It’s Friday afternoon, and you are reviewing the week’s feedback logs with one of your agents. You notice that your Copywriter keeps using a formal tone for your social copy. Your Data Wizard keeps stating hypotheses as facts. Your Chief of Staff keeps forgetting to block 45 minutes for launch when you plan your day each morning. To address the first issue, you need to update your Copywriter’s persona. The second issue is already covered in a team rule, but it needs to be sharpened. You can fix the last one in the Plan my day skill. Your agent makes the required changes so that next week you are less likely to hit these issues again. ...

With a knowledge base , your team has the context they need to do their jobs. But you’re still going to run into issues when you work with them. Your Copywriter gives you character counts for ad copy that are inaccurate. Your Data Wizard states unproven claims about why a metric went up or down as facts. You continue to have to tell your Marketing Strategist to look at audience insights to inform their messaging recommendations. Your team creates files in the wrong place. ...

In the last post, you built your team , and now you can start managing your team. Pick the agent that makes the most sense for the task at hand, and work with them on it. When you move on to a new task, open a new session with the appropriate agent for that task. As you work with your team, you’ll quickly notice that you’re giving them the same facts and details over and over again. They’re good in their roles, but they don’t know anything about your specific job. Your Marketing Strategist doesn’t know what products you’re working on. Your Data Wizard doesn’t know what the metrics mean in the data they’re analyzing. Your Copywriter doesn’t know which value props to highlight in your ad copy. They’re missing information they need to do the work. You’ve run into the first type of gap: a knowledge gap. Now you need to fix it. ...

I remember when I realized I was starting to use AI at work as if I were managing a team of AI employees . I got so excited, I immediately sketched the idea on a sheet of paper so I could share it with my teammates. What started as a sketch is now core to how I use AI agents to do things faster and better at work and at home. It’s an approach that naturally guides you toward the context engineering best practices that improve LLM output. ...

I used to think of AI as a tool I used. Now I think of it as a team I manage. This perspective evolved gradually as I used it daily and found myself rewriting the same persona prompts over and over again for the same types of tasks. I started systematically improving what I was doing until I found myself managing a team, which happened to be made up of AI agents, at the end of the 7-month journey that made me an AI enthusiast . ...

I was slow to start using generative AI, but over the last 7 months, AI has fundamentally changed how I work. I’ve gone from occasionally using AI to write text, to using it to create Python scripts, to now having a team of five custom AI agents that I collaborate with daily. I’m seeing how quickly the benefits are compounding, and as a result, I’ve been AI-pilled. I began learning about LLM-based gen AI in earnest in 2024. I read all the most popular books at the time, but my exposure remained primarily theoretical. I learned how LLMs work fundamentally, but the biggest practical takeaway was the idea of assigning a persona to chatbots to improve their output. That’s basic prompt engineering, e.g. “You are a copywriter with 15+ years of experience in consumer tech. Help me write a marketing email about this product.” On the rare occasion I used a chatbot, I always remembered to assign it a persona. ...