AgentSee Podcast

James set up AgentSee's own mail server on a Swiss VPS, with an agent writing the OpenTofu and most of the configuration: two afternoons' work rather than the weeks it would once have taken. Abrar asks what was hard, and the answer is the click ops inside Stalwart's admin panel, a CLI that was not built for an agent, buttons the model insisted existed, and making the result reproducible afterwards with a snapshot script. They also cover borrowing sender reputation, the monitoring that is not built yet, whether either of them would recommend this to a client (no), and what it is like to let an agent drive the browser.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Why mail at all
• 02:15 The alternatives, and why Infomaniak
• 05:56 OpenTofu, and what the agent wrote
• 07:26 Stalwart: the click ops and a clunky CLI
• 12:31 Buttons that don't exist, and the snapshot
• 16:40 Set and forget: spam, SES and the relay
• 19:00 Monitoring, and what we have not built
• 21:56 Reputation: borrow someone else's
• 23:51 What the server holds
• 25:48 Would we do it again?
• 29:53 Letting an agent click
• 36:53 Where to find it all
• 38:00 Outro

Mentioned:

• Issue No. 2: the mail server, written up
• The infrastructure, as OpenTofu, on GitHub
• Stalwart mail server
• OpenTofu
• Infomaniak Public Cloud
• SMTP2GO

Of the questions on the site, this one touches:

• 4. Who is accountable for a system that nobody typed?
• 8. Do engineers still want the job? What is it now — author, reviewer, director, or something we don't yet have a word for?

AgentSee is two people building a company in public, with agents doing the work.

https://agentsee.work · [email protected]

Subscribe: https://agentsee.work/podcast/feed.xml

James Hartt and Abrar Mahmood introduce themselves and the premise of AgentSee: a software agency for a world where working software can be prompted into existence. Agencies were organised around protecting developer time and billing for it; when that is no longer the expensive part, what does a client pay for? Their answer, for now, is the last stretch to production, which is as hard as it ever was.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Welcome, and who we are
• 02:32 The premise: what agencies were built to protect
• 04:43 What a client pays for now
• 05:49 Where the value is: the last five percent
• 07:34 Wrap up
• 07:59 Outro

Mentioned:

• Issue No. 1: the premise, and the ten questions

Of the questions on the site, this one touches:

• 1. If writing the code is no longer the expensive part, what is the client actually buying?
• 7. What does taste mean when volume is free?

AgentSee is two people building a company in public, with agents doing the work.

https://agentsee.work · [email protected]

Subscribe: https://agentsee.work/podcast/feed.xml