Host netanel-abergel opens with “Elnie”, a personal agent with its own phone number, email, and accounts. It grew into a 30–40-agent WhatsApp network, which taught that chat is the wrong medium and that agents should be team members, not personal clones. matan-cohen (co-founder of Dotti, acquired by Slack; now Head of Slack Israel) describes the AI UX paradox: a text box lets users ask anything and expect anything, yet hides what the product can actually do. His answer is “proactive AI”: surface capabilities through the product (a “prepare me for a meeting” button, AI answers in search) and bring answers to people where they already ask. Dotti’s privately-shown channel auto-replies spread “like wildfire”. On measurement: from manual conversation review to intent clustering to offline evals in CI (“eval-driven design”), and the harder problem of finding unknown intents without seeing private user data. Hot take: coding is dead, engineering isn’t. Roles move up a level of abstraction, as network engineers became DevOps.
Show: ai-engineering-podcast
Concepts: proactive-ai · llm-evals · agent-workspaces · future-of-software-engineering · context-engineering