Custom skills with hooks enforce quality at the point of creation, not after the fact
The speaker discusses the future of different API interfaces and emphasizes the importance of providing real-time assistance to agents during their discovery processes. The focus is on enabling agents to complete complex multi-step tasks autonomously without requiring users to handle manual workarounds.
Summary
The speaker presents their vision for the future of various interface technologies, specifically highlighting the continued relevance of CLIs (Command Line Interfaces), MCP (Model Context Protocol), and REST APIs. They advocate for increased adoption of ephemeral and multi-step APIs, noting that CLIs are particularly well-suited for handling these more complex interaction patterns. The core argument centers on improving agent capabilities during discovery and interaction phases. Rather than forcing agents to defer back to users when encountering obstacles, the speaker emphasizes the need for systems that provide real-time guidance, hints, and contextual help. This approach would enable agents to autonomously complete complex tasks like user sign-ups and other multi-step processes without interrupting the user experience or requiring manual intervention.
About this episode
This is the CICD mindset applied upstream—you can now architect opinionated workflows into the coding process itself, not just the deployment process. Build guardrails that make the golden path the only path.
Key Insights
- The speaker believes CLIs are particularly effective at wrapping ephemeral and multi-step APIs
- The speaker argues that agents should receive real-time hints and help during their discovery interactions rather than being forced to defer to users
- The speaker emphasizes that agents should be able to complete complex tasks like sign-ups autonomously without requiring users to handle manual workarounds
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] I think there's a future for CLIs, and MCP, and REST APIs. I'd like us to become more comfortable around things like ephemeral APIs or multi-step APIs. I think CLIs are good at wrapping these kind of things. But, the whole point of all this, what I'm getting at, is like you want to be able to just help agents out at the time when they're interacting, they're in discovery mode, and you want to give them clues, you want to give them hints, you want to give them help to be able to do things like sign up for something fully without having to go back to the user and say, "Yeah, sorry, I can't help you there.…
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