Over the past 15 years, every business problem has become its own (extremely niche) software category, and now the work lives everywhere. This week we found ourselves bobbing and weaving throughout so many disparate tasks, projects, systems, hardware, and software. But one thing remained constant: our agents as the glue connecting all those things back together.
Let’s get into it.
Russell: The Agents Are Preparing for Takeoff
Every business has that one mission critical person – the one who knows where everything is saved, random details about every customer, and information about projects from 3 years ago that need to be referenced. At members clubs or hospitality businesses, that person is the front desk employee, and they typically have their hands full. So, this week, I flew to Denver to set up a front desk agent for a padel club. A front desk agent has to connect bookings, texts, WhatsApp, customer questions, program availability, court schedules, and a real mobile phone.
I was literally on-site setting up the agent to connect with the club’s existing tools, because the agent needs to live where the business actually happens, which is always in the messy systems that they run on every day. One of the most important parts about a front desk agent is understanding the nuances and local dynamics of a club’s members. Who likes to play with whom? At what time? Which group always shows up for open play? These are all things currently in the brain of the club’s head pro and staff. Now they can live in the agent’s brain, too.
Actual footage of Russell’s packing essentials, including his padel racquet, Padel Browser gear, and of course the Mac Mini for our agents. (This image also doubles as a self-portrait of Russell’s entire identity.)
Julia: The Five-Person Relay Race is (Finally) Over
I had a moment this week where I turned to Russell and said: remember when building a website meant coordinating a designer, a product manager, a frontend engineer, a backend engineer, and someone to wire up analytics? The designer would hand off Figma files, the PM would turn them into tickets in Jira, a front-end engineer would interpret the designs, a back-end engineer would connect the CMS and APIs, and then everyone would spend weeks going back and forth in Slack and email trying to make sure the thing actually matched what was intended. It always came with a lot of pain and took 3x as long as anticipated.
Today, that whole process has been collapsed into a conversation. It's how I spent a lot of my time this week. I worked with an agent in Claude Code that reads the design file, understands the codebase, implements the frontend, connects the CMS, wires up analytics, spins up staging links, incorporates feedback, and keeps the thread of context intact across every step. What used to be a five-person handoff chain now looks like a team of one (yours truly) plus an agent. The agent is the glue across the entire process. It goes into those systems so I don't have to.
In sum: we’re probably going to need more glue.
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
