Robert Ta walks through Elon Musk's five-step process for building companies, which ends with automation only after questioning requirements, deleting steps, and simplifying. He warns against automating broken processes, sharing how he wasted hours automating client onboarding before realizing high-value customers wanted human contact instead.
Elon Musk's algorithm here, these are the 5 steps. You question every requirement. You make requirements less dumb. So always assign a specific person's name, not some foggy department like legal or safety, to each requirement. Delete any part or process. So this is vigorously stripping away unnecessary steps and always questioning whether the step should exist. Always question the assumptions that led to the step because it might not need to exist anymore in today timeframe versus Yesterday, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, kind of thing. Step 3, simplify and optimize. Do this after deleting unneeded parts. The most common mistake of smart engineers is optimizing a part or process that shouldn't exist in the first place. Very true. Over-engineering is a thing. Step 4, accelerate cycle time. So speed up the remaining steps that are left. However, never speed up something until you have determined it is necessary. And necessary is a really key word there because a lot of his ethos is like simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify, delete, delete, delete, right? So really understand like What is necessary and what is not in your cycle or your process or your company's algorithm. Automate. And that's the last step, step 5. That's the final step. Musk has personally made the mistake of automating bad or unnecessary processes first and warns against applying technology to broken workflows. So it's, it's cool to think about Elon Musk's algorithm for building companies. These 5 steps as principled ways of decreasing the cycle time to production of the service or good. To go compete in market as a business. And it's cool to think about that in terms of setting an agent towards some sort of closed loop, right? Because business, ideally, you have a closed loop. Go make money, business. And this is Elon's principles around that, to build a durable business that makes money. And it's kind of cool to talk about that at the parallel of these agents. I wonder if any of these logical principles are making their way into the underlying goal loops at all.
I think that's our job with the harness. I'm glad you brought this up because I think that, um, when it comes to like practical use of harness, you know, you can look at the systems that Elon's used to build his business and why would it be any different? The harness is just a tool to capture those learnings and to like, you know, graduate processes from being something that happens manually and then happens with reduced cost and then happens over and over again repeatedly and then can be automated. And that's what you're trying to use your agents for. Premature optimization is going to fail every time. You shouldn't expect these things to be magic. You should expect that a harness is a way to gradually automate a process just like you would in any other aspect of engineering in a business.
Agreed. And I'll throw in a quick story there. When I first was building out the harness for my OpenClaw, I was thinking, okay, so we should automate client onboarding. And I spent like 5 hours trying to automate what if we got a prospect, closes a sale, and then I want them to automate, I want my OpenClaw to interface with them to automate onboarding for like a cool AI-native services kind of experience. Like it onboards you to Slack, it has an input form for all the creds we need to like manage your codebase and your deployment and your infra and stuff like that. The dev side. And then when it came down to it, I realized I just wasted 5 or 6 hours because all the time, like, humans want to be onboarded by other humans. So, like, especially for a business contract. So it's like, well, what the fuck was the point of this? So that would have just added a step, which I now see as like, nobody wants to be onboarded by an agent when you've signed a contract with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They want to be onboarded by a fucking human, right? So that was like, ah, stupid Robert, why'd you even overengineer this? This is not even a problem to solve. So, one must control themselves when it comes to the dopamine releases that is the addiction of cloud coding too far. That's the lesson learned there.
