Craig now manages AI agents in an hour instead of meeting with colleagues individually, handling follow-ups and email campaigns. Jason M. Lemkin counters that supervising agents demands intense mental effort, and at Qualified, half the code comes from Cursor yet engineers still work full days. The trade-off: more output, same exhaustion.
Chapters
So yeah, instead of my hour now being with those people, I spend an hour with all of our agents in the morning. Again, used to be setup. Now I check on all of them. I see if there's any follow-ups we need to do. And then I do more things now, right? Like, used to be, okay, I'm gonna set up all the platforms to do their core things. I'm gonna set up inbound, outbound, support, ticket information, event support, like whatever we need, we have that all set up now with our agents. Then I was like, oh, now I can do email. Like, I can de-anonymize some of our website traffic. I can send them a follow-up campaign if they didn't actually buy a ticket. Maybe it doesn't matter if they were on the website or not. Like, now we have all these different use cases that it started to compound itself because I'm like, now I can just do a lot more in that 1 hour with like my 5 core agents than talking to 2 humans 30 minutes each in the morning.
But it is more like this is as a society, we're going to figure this out. It is because you can do more work. It is a higher cognitive load. You have to think more, right? You don't, you don't spend time arguing with people. As I say with Amelia, the agents don't cry. Okay, they don't cry, and, uh, and that is exhausting, right? But it's exhausting in a different way, right? Exactly. You know, if someone's gonna cry meeting with you, Craig, you just have to sit there for an hour. Okay? But you don't have to think, you don't have to use all your brain cells for an hour, do you? With your agents— You have to listen. It's so many brain cells, and that's what— that's— and so I just think that, you know, even if you think about coding, you know, everyone— I just wrote this up— everyone brags that 50% of our code at Qualified is written by, by, uh, Cursor, or— but That doesn't mean your engineers only work 3 hours a day, does it? No, not at all. Yeah. So I haven't seen a lot of engineers complain about, but I do think for the best engineers there's more cognitive load. Yes. Because you can do more. It's not as simple as doing more releases. That's more you have to think, okay, engineering is very creative. So the more of the road stuff that's done, it's fun, but it's exhausting. You might have to think about how to make that agent work better 8 hours a day instead of 3 hours a day. It's much better, but I don't know that everyone can make the jump.
