Dan digs into “standalone” AI agents—agents you kick off with a goal and they go figure it out without you babysitting them. He talks through building a DIY orchestration setup with a “composer/conductor” agent that breaks work into subtasks and hands them to sub-agents (great for parallelizing work and keeping the main agent’s context clean). Along the way he runs into the real pain points: getting prompts tight enough to stop agents from being super chatty, dealing with local models that struggle with instruction-following, and weighing the tradeoffs.

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